Get Organized Checklist for Your Bathroom

This week I’m continuing my Get Organized series with a get organized checklist for your bathroom. If you have kids, the bathrooms in your home can get pretty messy pretty quickly.

You may not be able to solve the problem of your child shaking out their rinsed toothbrush all over the bathroom mirror. However, you can thwart some other behavioral culprits that lead to messy bathrooms with a little foresight as you organize. This get organized checklist for your bathroom is written with families in mind.

First Steps

Before we get to organizing the bathroom, we need to start with a clean slate. Your first steps should be to:

Remove everything from cabinets, shelves and drawers – Place everything in a large box or on a table
Take care of any maintenance – Tighten drawer knobs, cabinet handles and hinges; unclog slow drains with Liquid Plumr (visit Liquid-Plumr’s website for more tips on preventing and destroying clogs); fix leaky faucets

Clean all surfaces – Wipe down counters, cabinet doors, inside cabinets and shelves, and mirrors
Group like items together – For example: dental hygiene products, cleaning products, paper products, hair care
Throw out expired or damaged items – Get rid of all expired medicines, damaged items that can no longer be used, and old makeup

Medicine Cabinet

Once you’ve finished creating a clean slate in the bathroom, you can tackle the medicine cabinet. Make sure it’s fully stocked so you aren’t scrambling out in the middle of the night when one of the kids wakes up with a terrible cough. Consult my medicine cabinet checklist for suggestions or print it off and keep it taped inside the medicine cabinet door.

Keeping kids in mind, store your medications and first aid supplies in an area that your kids can’t easily see or access. I keep most of our medications in our master bathroom for this reason. It does make it easier to keep the items organized, but it’s more important for safety reasons.

Paper and Cotton Goods

Each bathroom should have a good supply of toilet paper and tissues. The cabinet under the bathroom sink is a good place for these. For one, in most bathrooms, this is usually near the toilet. In addition, these products don’t pose a danger to your kids if they happen upon them.

One or more of your bathrooms will probably house cotton balls and cotton swabs. I like to keep these in clear jars so it’s easy to see when we are running low. You can keep the extras in a bin under the sink with the toilet paper and tissues.

Towels

You may keep your towels in your linen closet. If you have young children, there’s a tremendous benefit in storing the towels away from the bathroom – the kids don’t mess them up! You just swap out the bathroom towels every few days with fresh ones.

If, like me, you like to store your towels in the bathroom, you can still thwart your kids from messing up your beautifully folded towels. (See last week’s Get Organized Checklist for Your Laundry Room for tips on folding towels.) The trick is to store the towels low.

You see, most of the time, kids make a mess of the towels because they pull the bottom towel from the pile, disrupting all the others. If you store the towels low (like under the sink with the toilet paper and tissues), they have to reach DOWN to get a towel and end up taking the one from the top of the pile.

We’ve traditionally had terrible luck with towel racks, especially when my kids were little and would yank on the towels to remove them from the rack. Inevitably, the rack would pull out from the wall.

For this reason, I’m a big fan of hooks for holding towels and robes. They’re easier to install and easier for kids to use.

Cleaning Supplies

Since I’ve recommended that you keep your towels and paper products in the spot where most people keep their cleaning supplies, you might be worried I forgot about them. Don’t worry, as a germophobe, I have a whole arsenal of cleaning supplies and have given a lot of thought to where to store them.

I happen to have tall, narrow linen closets in each of my bathrooms so I keep our cleaning supplies on the top shelf of these closets. In our last home (which didn’t have bathroom closets), I kept the cleaning supplies in the cabinet above the toilet. If you don’t have one of those either, you can hang your own or buy an over-the-toilet rack.

Hair and Beauty

As a mom, my beauty routine is pretty basic. I rely on a few simple tools and I like to keep them easily accessible. I use a desk organizer in a top drawer of the bathroom to keep these essentials organized and easy to find.

In the larger drawer beneath it, I keep my blow dryer, flat iron, and curling iron. In my last house, I kept my hair styling tools in a vase on my counter. Depending on how often you use these items, these might take up a priority space in your bathroom or get relegated to a back corner.

Bath and Shower

When my kids were younger, I kept a mesh basket in the tub to hold the bath toys. About once a month you should soak bath toys in white vinegar or bleach water for 10 minutes (make sure to rinse several times) to disinfect them.

When my kids got older, I used shower caddies (that hang off the shower head) to hold their soap, shampoo, body wash and loofahs. This made cleaning the tub and shower easier since I didn’t have to move all those bottles. It also eliminated wasted shampoo and body wash that used to occur when a bottle would get knocked off the side of the tub.

Download the Get Organized Checklist for Your Bathroom

Use the printable checklist to help you organize and stock your bathroom. Check off the first steps as you complete them. Then consult the list for each category to make sure you have all of your necessities fully stocked.

Click the image below to print or download your checklist.