Decluttering the Bathroom — Week 8 of 52

My first floor half bath gets a lot of use, but I haven’t cleaned out the cabinet for many years.

And since I had sinus surgery last year– to stay healthy, I have to use a saline spray made with distilled water once or twice every day. Unfortunately, I can’t remember to do it unless it’s right out in front of me, either!

Those are the factors that contributed to the sad shape of my cluttered downstairs bathroom. During 8 week of my 52 weeks of decluttering, I finally bit the bullet and took on a clean-up and a semi-make-over.

Bathroom before

The first task was corralling things that are used often and need to be in plain sight, and putting them in containers — to hide them somewhat and to make it easy to move when dusting and cleaning the area.

Found some cute lime green containers at Hobby Lobby and decided they’d go with my normally jewel-toned bath mats and wall hangings. Even went wild and glued some green flowers on the basket and stuck a whirly-gig inside.

I got some wild purple bathmats, too, on a day I was longing for springtime.

Then I took everything out of the cabinet (forgot to take a photo) and spread it around me while sitting on the floor.

I gathered a big pile of spare bathroom mats, towels, wall hangings and other items from inside the cabinet and took them out to the Goodwill give-away bin in my garage.

Got a crate of XL storage bags from the attic (only $1 a box at the dollar store — and $8 or more at discount stores). Packed several bathroom mat sets with matching hand towels that I wanted to keep in the bags and stowed them back under the cabinet. If there’s a water leak or other incident, hopefully they’ll stay dry. And it should be easy to pull out a whole set if I have a sudden urge to change the bathroom decor to some other color.