I’m prepping our house for the holiday season with some major decluttering, bathroom organization, and refreshing our linen closet for guests with some gorgeous bins, baskets, contact paper, and paint…
Chris and I are in a very busy season of life right now…
If you’ve been following along here or on my Instagram, you probably already know we have a few exciting events coming up this winter. For one, we are expecting our second sweet rainbow baby at the end of January – WOOHOO!
My mom is also traveling up here to the mitten state from my home state of North Carolina for the weekend we will be giving birth in January to help us out with the boys while I’m in the hospital. It’s been a few years since she’s come up, and I’m so excited to see her!
We are also hosting Christmas for my husband’s family this year, which means we are going to have his parents, his brothers, their wives, and all their kids in our home celebrating together. I’ll be about 8 months pregnant around Christmas time this year!
I’m not sure if it’s my nesting kicking in or the fact that I have all of these big events coming up (perhaps it’s all of the above), but I’m ready to kick the clutter to the curb before I have everyone over for the holidays and our baby’s birth.
With so many people in our home, I need to make sure our linen closet and bathroom are organized as those are the two parts of our home that will see the most traffic.
In this post, I’ll show you how I decluttered both our bathroom and linen closet, cleaned up, and got everything organized for the upcoming holidays and a full house of our friends and family…
This post is written in partnership with The Container Store and contains affiliate links. All opinions are my own, as always.
Organizing our Bathroom drawers
Our bathroom drawers were an absolute MESS.
It’s been about a year since I’ve really gone in and decluttered our bathroom drawers, but this is what I had to look at every morning when I went to grab my contact lens case or makeup…
And here’s a behind the scenes look at the decluttering process:
I didn’t even know all the items I was housing in our bathroom drawers until I made the decision to empty them out and look.
All I can say is that you learn a lot about yourself when you start emptying out drawers.
I had also previously tried to organize our drawers last year using wire baskets, but these didn’t work for the items we were trying to store because they were uneven on the bottom (the way the metal was weaved over and under), and weren’t solid.
Everything I put in them would end up falling over on its side, which led to things being stacked on top of each other in a giant mess over several months.
For our bathroom drawers, I decided to use some solid 10″x10″ modular bins from The Container Store, a few shallow (2 inches high) drawer organizers.
Here’s what my top drawer looked like when I was all done decluttering and organizing…
This top drawer was a touch under 3″ tall, so my challenge was finding a storage solution that would fit and work with the items I needed to organize like my bobby pins, makeup, toothpaste, combs, etc.
The Container Store has a 5-pc. set of clear acrylic drawer organizers that are 2″ tall and form a 12″x12″ square. Considering our top drawers were 19″ wide, I decided to use three of these for our two drawers, splitting one set of organizers between the two drawers.
Here’s all his beard stuff organized neatly using 1.5 drawer organizer sets…
For our deeper drawers, I used a 10″x10″ clear modular bin in each drawer. I limited myself to using only one bin per drawer to help limit the amount of products and clutter I was willing to put back into these drawers.
The base and sides of these modular bins are solid and straight, which make them perfect for storing bottles, jars, cans, etc. without causing them to fall over like our older wire baskets.
Anything that was too tall to stand up straight in our deep drawers was neatly laid on its side, but never stacked.
I finally have room for my styling products, hairdryer, diffuser attachment, and straightener!
Under The Sink Organization
To clean under our sink, I pulled everything out, measured the space we had, and decided that bins weren’t going to work well in this space to organize it. I had about 6″ of width to work with on the left side of the pipe under our bathroom sink, and 9″ on the right.
I had my eye on a 2-tier pull out organizer from The Container Store to put here, but the PVC pipe in the middle would have made that impossible.
To organize under our bathroom sink, I removed everything and wiped down the walls and floor, replacing the old shelf liner with new shelf liner.
I found the perfect clear cleaning caddy to fit on the right side and store all of my go-to cleaners and tools.
Countertop Bathroom Storage
We originally had a very large canister to store our Q-tips in, but nothing for our cotton balls.
I ended up repurposing the larger canister for feminine products to store in one of our deeper bathroom drawers and opted to get size-appropriate square canisters, one for our cotton balls and one for our Q-tips.
They make the perfect storage option and look beautiful on the counters. The clear design also doesn’t add visual weight to the counters.
I also opted to grab a matching square soap dispenser and a square toothbrush holder.
We really needed a new toothbrush holder because our old one would not fit my son’s battery-powered toothbrush base. Our new, fully open top is perfect for storing all of our toothbrushes upright and together, minimizing extra clutter.
Also, I’m not going to lie, I couldn’t stand the fact that our toothbrush holder matched the bright blue bathroom wall color perfectly – it was just too much blue for me!
Organizing Our Linen Closet
I decided to include our linen closet in our bathroom organization project given the fact that it houses our bath essentials and some medications.
Our linen closet has been driving me bonkers for about 5 years.
First off, it’s a light peach color inside.
Second, the shelves are handbuilt. Although I will say they aren’t terribly made, but up close you can kind of tell.
Third, it’s completely disorganized!
Here’s what it looked like before I refreshed this space…
And here’s what it looks like now…
To organize our linen closet, I removed everything completely. I ended up painting the shelves and walls with extra white paint I had leftover from our fireplace and applied faux wallpaper to update this space (I did the same for our pantry – check out the post here!).
Older towels and beach towels were moved down to the basement where we usually store them once the season changes and the cold air sets in. In the winter, we usually keep a set of full-size blue towels and a set of white towels on one shelf in this closet.
I think I’ll just keep those other towels downstairs all the time, though – look at how much space we have now!
Now that those towels are out of this small linen closet, I can also fold and store our blankets longways in the closet.
The space between each shelf was about 11″, except for the very top and the very bottom. The bottom of the closet offered 19″ of vertical space, and I found some baskets that fit perfectly there!
We’ll be using one laundry basket for colors and one basket for whites.
Our medications and first-aid essentials were previously stored in a container in our bathroom drawers, taking up space. It wasn’t the safest option, so I decided to move them to the linen closet out of reach.
I decided that the top two shelves in our linen closet were perfect for these items, and found some great turntables, lazy susans, and modular bins to help us store those items beautifully.
I love that everything is so visible and easily accessible for both myself and my husband now on these higher-level shelves. And if my kids happen to need a band-aid or a skin cream while we’re giving birth in the hospital this winter when my mom comes to visit, I know she’ll be able to find what they need with ease.
BTW, this is easily my favorite section of this bathroom organization post because it’s so organized and gorgeous!
This clear acrylic lazy susan from The Container Store (see above) is perfect for our first-aid supplies! I can find anything we need quickly and can see everything. It has four divided sections, which I organized into:
- Gauze, dressings, cleaning wipes
- Skin and eye treatments, ointments, gels, and creams
- Burn aids, gels, dressings
- Extras (like an ear thermometer and vapor rub cream
For medications and pain relievers, the two-tier turntable I picked up is perfect. I can store our larger bottles of medicine on the lower level, and our smaller pain-relieving medications on the top.
For our other essentials that I don’t want the kids getting into, I found these clear handled 10″x10″ modular bins to help get us even more organized.
These are the same bins I used to help organize our deep drawers in our bathroom.
I designated one shelf for hand towels, rags, and toilet paper, and put it at Max’s eye level (my 9-year-old).
I did this on purpose to help foster some independence so I’m not always the one replacing the toilet paper roll or hand towel in the bathroom ;).
I love this white Guzzini pantry bin for our wash rags – it’s the perfect storage solution to help keep the rags stored upright so they are easy to grab, take up less space, and look pretty!
Bathroom Organization Vlog
Don’t forget to check out my Bathroom Organization vlog below that shows you how I refreshed our linen closet and organized and decluttered the closet and bathroom spaces below…
What spaces are you planning on organizing before the holiday season? Let me know in the comments below!