A Pro Organizer Fixed My Cluttered Medicine Cabinet | Apartment Therapy

Whenever I’ve considered attempting to organize and streamline my cluttered medicine cabinet, I’ve easily grown overwhelmed. I have such limited space in my tiny studio apartment that this single cabinet is constantly overflowing. It’s a mess — filled with products I rarely use, have trouble finding, and odds and ends like makeup and medicine that has likely expired.

Lack of bathroom storage space is a common problem, especially for small or shared spaces. “Medicine cabinets are particularly tricky because they are pretty shallow, which really limits the size and volume of items you can store here,” says Elsa Elbert, the founder and CEO of Composed Living, a Los Angeles-based professional organizing company.

Elbert’s overall recommendation for a bathroom with limited storage is to only store the daily necessities in this space and find another solution for backstock and lesser-used items. I asked Elbert for her help in optimizing and streamlining my medicine cabinet, and here’s what she recommended.

The best way to organize your medicine cabinet is to start fresh, so take everything out and then categorize items. Some common categories include daily use, backstock, first aid, medications, and hair products and tools, Elbert shares.

Once everything is in its categories, it’s easier to declutter anything that is no longer being used. Be very honest with yourself in this process! This part was hard for me, as it’s hard for me to get rid of anything.

I cleaned out everything from my medicine cabinet and found a lot of excess — large containers of products I rarely use, expired pain medication and allergy pills, and a bizarre amount of duplicates. So, it made it easy to parse that area down a lot, both with items to toss and others, rarely used, to relocate elsewhere in my apartment.

“We often have items in our bathrooms that we know we don’t love or use, but we keep them anyway,” Elbert says. That old face mask that you didn’t love? Give it to someone else to try! Do you travel a lot and have an accumulation of hotel and travel-sized toiletries and such? This can lead to a lot of clutter. Pay it forward and make your decluttering effort have meaning by donating them to a local shelter.

It was then about restocking the medicine cabinet with only those items that needed to be accessible daily. It was originally stocked with various bandages, medications, and large containers that are all important to have on hand but only needed occasionally. This meant that I could free up some space and relocate those first aid and bulk items.

For the duplicate items, I decided to decant them into containers where possible, based on Elbert’s suggestion. “Instead of keeping the oversized container of things like mouthwash or body lotion, consider decanting them into a smaller jar/container. Not only will this create more space, but you’ll remove the visual clutter of the branded packaging by storing it in a simpler container,” Elbert says.

My medicine cabinet is now divided into three shelves and is so much more organized. One shelf holds hair and beauty-type items, such as nail polish remover and styling products, while another is focused on important health items like cold medicine, a thermometer, and such. The bottom level has the health and hygiene products I use very regularly.