The Best Ways to Organize Your Medicine Cabinet

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Organization is important everywhere, but it's particularly crucial when you're dealing with stuff like medications and everyday essentials, which you need to access on a daily basis—usually when you're still half asleep from the night before. If your medicine cabinet is a bit of a disaster zone, here are some items and strategies to get it back into shape.

Consider a new medicine cabinet

First of all, your medicine cabinet itself may not be up to snuff. I've rented for a long time and the stock cabinets that come with my apartments have always been small and cheap—they barely hold anything. You can get a new, better medicine cabinet for a relatively affordable price and get the upgrade taken care of in one day.

Remember that when you're sticking to the guidelines of having space for everything and sorting similar items together, you want space for a lot of little containers, which means a variety of shelving and storage options. Something like this, with shelves on the interior and exterior, is perfect:

Medicine cabinet organization

As with most organization projects, the bulk of your investment will likely be in containers. At the most basic level, this can involve uniformly sized, sturdy boxes. Some of the best organization and decluttering methods out there are very clear that you need containers for everything, as this not only keeps it all together, but forces you to get rid of unnecessary stuff that doesn't fit. In small cabinets, that means using ones like this:

I'm also a huge fan of decanting things, which applies to medicine, too. While you might want to keep prescriptions in their original bottles, you can consider putting your more generic pills—ibuprofen, antihistamines, etc.—in more uniform bottles with handmade labels. A set like this, which comes with a storage container and labels, can relieve some of the cabinet chaos. (Just make sure to include relevant safety information, like dosing limits, etc.)

For my medications, my personal preference is a large pill organizer. It fits well in my medicine cabinet when I'm home, but is easy to grab and take with me when I'm on the go. I refill it every month and it keeps my medicine cabinet from falling into total disarray. Try one like this to save space:

Organizing racks will also be your friend here. One like this, which holds pill bottles vertically and can be pulled out for easy access, is perfect for maximizing your cabinet's space.

Medicine cabinet organization tips

Once you have all of your containers sorted out, you should use them to store things by category. How you categorize your medications and other essentials depends on what you have, but broadly speaking, try to group them together similarly. "Vitamins," "digestion," and "pain" are solid starting points, for example. For maximum efficiency, label the containers. Some of the ones linked above come with labels, but you can also get a label maker that will help you with this task—and all your other household organizational tasks, too. Phomemo's D30 is just $19.98.

Depending on how much space you have, it might be tempting to store non-medication items in the medicine cabinet, but remember the golden rules: Everything needs a place and like should be stored with like. To avoid things from falling into chaos once again, try to store only health-related things in there. If you're struggling with where to put your makeup, hair care, or other bathroom items, try creating an organizational wall or looking into other creative bathroom storage ideas like these.