52 Weeks of Organizing Weeks 6 and 7 - Organizing My Teenage Daughter's Bathroom

I'm so proud of myself that we are well into February and I'm still faithfully continuing with the 52 Weeks of Organizing!  As I've said before, I KNOW that I wouldn't be carving out the time to organize problem areas of our house if it were not for the ongoing challenge at Org Junkie.

Over the past two weeks, I've focused on organizing my teenage daughter's bathroom.  Wow - for such a small room, it turned out to be a pretty big project!  I simply haven't decluttered in there for years - we've just gotten in the habit of cleaning around the mess on the counter and I tried to not even think about the mess in the drawers.  I've been wanting to organize my daughter's bathroom for quite a long time now - it was on my master to-do list for the past two summers!    

The main problem in Amber's bathroom was that it had been completely overtaken with years of gifts of lotion, soaps, lip balms, and hair accessories.  As well, there were lots of medicines that Amber had used in the past that never made their way back to the main medicine cabinet.  There was also just quite a bit of just plain junk that needed to be thrown away in the drawers!

None of the drawers had a clear job either.  Hair accessories, earrings, and lip balms could be found in a number of different drawers.  Due to the chaotic nature of the drawers, even though Amber owns handfuls of ponytail holders, she had difficulty ever finding one!

Bags of toiletries that had been taken on trips in the past were simply shoved back into drawers, adding to the  chaotic nature of the drawers.

In one of the bottom drawers, Amber had the first aid kit that she made in the mother-daughter group we participated in years ago.

The medicine cabinet was filled with BABY lotions.  I even found Children's Tylenol in there that expired in 2003.  Needless to say, a big part of organizing Amber's bathroom was major PURGING.
 
 Really, how many lip balms can one girl possibly ever use?  

 

I first tackled the counter area because I thought that a clear and pleasing-to-the-eye counter area would motivate me to continue with the project.  While the clear counter was very motivating to me, the excited praise from my daughter was much more motivating.  The clutter really was beyond what Amber could handle  going through on her own and she really appreciated my efforts to make her bathroom tidier and much more usable.  

After organizing all of the drawers, Amber even has some empty drawers now!  I may move the towels to two of the empty drawers since the basket does not fit underneath the sink.

I used containers that I already had to organize the larger pieces of jewelry, lip balm (I did purge quite a bit of lip balm), ponytail elastics, scrunchies, headbands, and barrettes.

I used these divided containers for earrings.  The earring holder she had was all rusted and I just chucked that in the trash.  I'll be keeping my eyes open for even better earring storage.

The medicine cabinet now only holds toiletries that Amber will actually use.  She has two empty sections in her medicine cabinet now.  

While this was a time-consuming project, it was definitely worth it.  Now instead of feeling antsy every time I get near Amber's bathroom, I feel a sense of accomplishment.  I am also happy that the bathroom is so much more user-friendly for my daughter now!

To read about what other bloggers were organizing this week, visit Org Junkie's 52 Weeks of Organizing.