I am not immune to the Marie Kondo craze that’s currently sweeping the nation. In fact, I read her book back when it came out a few years ago and her decluttering philosophy definitely changed the way I think about our home. After binge watching pretty much the whole Netflix series in one day, I decided to tackle decluttering our downstairs bathroom cupboard. It’s a spot in the center of our downstairs that has so much potential, with three large shelves and ample drawer storage. But since we’ve lived here, it’s been sadly underutilized with almost nothing in the drawers and my original attempt at organizing the top shelves wasn’t working anymore. I forgot to take a proper “before” photo, but imagine this with overflowing bins and empty sticks of deodorant everywhere. As you can see, me clearing out the shelves to start fresh turned into me tearing out the old shelf liners and deciding I was going to paint the interior IMMEDIATELY.

Luckily, I have about 30 paint sample quarts in my basement and had recently upgraded my kitchen canisters so I spend a whopping zero dollars on this project. I chose Escape Gray by Sherwin Williams, a lovely neutral that’s long been one of my favorites. Before, I actually had some paint samples and spare amber bottles for making essential oil concoctions on the top shelf and white bins on the middle and bottom shelf. When I was reorganizing the shelves, I decided to lay them out like this:

Top shelf: our backstock of paper towels and toilet paper. I buy these in bulk online and I have never had a proper home for this stuff. The bathroom is steps away from our kitchen and pretty central to our downstairs floor plan. I just grab some extra rolls from here when we’re running low upstairs and it’s given me more space in that bathroom closet, which is much smaller and also in need of a makeover!

Middle shelf: I narrowed down our bins to just three categories - First Aid/Pain Relief, Cold/Flu/Allergy, and Skin Care. I threw away expired medicine and anything that was almost empty or something we don’t really use. We had some stuff that had expired before we even bought our house, which means it probably moved from our Pittsburgh apartment, back home to York and then into our house with us. What a waste of space and products! I’ve resolved to be more minimal when it comes to our new “medicine cabinet” .

Bottom shelf: This bathroom had two towel bars that promptly fell off the wall within the first few months we lived here. The downstairs bathroom is in sore need of a complete renovation, and I’m hoping we can get that started at some point this year. When that happens, the outside of the cupboard will be painted whatever color I choose for the walls and/or trim so that’s why I painted just the interior. Anyway, I decided this would be a great home for our towels as well. The upstairs bathroom is basically my bathroom, so I just grab a towel from downstairs when I need one and I hang it on the peg rack in our bedroom to dry and reuse. I also took our bars of soap out of the cardboard packaging and stacked them in a glass canister that previously housed my flour in the kitchen. Of all the upgrades, I think I like this the most. Not only does it look pretty, I can actually see when we’re running low on soap now so I don’t forget to buy more!

I took these photos about 2 weeks after I did this little project and really didn’t have to clean up or reorganize anything. I didn’t photograph the insides of each drawer, but the way I organized those is working really well for us too. The top drawer is Anthony’s stuff, second drawer is mine, third drawer is Sage’s and the fourth drawer holds a few tools and our stash of extra lightbulbs. Having places for all these things now is so exhilarating! I told Anthony in 2019, I’m going to organize every square inch of our house to peak efficiency. Since this project, I’ve already redone the cabinet under the kitchen sink and I’m so excited to organize my new home studio once we finish moving the furniture in!

Did Marie Kondo inspire you to do any decluttering projects?

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