Bekki is sharing tips for how to organize your medicine cabinet.
It seems that in this day and age we have a medicine available for everything. Whether you are the traditional or more holistic type you still will have one common need when it comes to medicine….where to put it. There are a few things to keep in mind when storing medicine that you may not already be aware of.
How to Organize Your Medicine Cabinet
The bathroom cabinet seems to be a place where a lot of people keep their medication but this is NOT the best place to keep it. Bathrooms can harbor a lot of heat and moisture and neither is good for your prescription or over the counter medicine. This may damage your medicine causing it to loose it's potency or may make it expire before the date stated. Just keep that in mind while we go through the organization process today. Always keep your medicine up and away from children. It just takes one simple mistake that could harm your child for a lifetime.
Once you have your space picked out where you are going to keep your medicines you will want to find some way to get them more organized. The most important thing is to be able to find what you need when you need it. Just picture it being midnight…. the baby has a fever of 102.4 and is screaming at the top of its lungs and you can't figure out where the Tylenol is!!! Sounds like something that has happened a million times before doesn't it?
Install a lighting system in your cabinet area. Medication bottles and tubes are small, clutter easily and are hard to read. You will want to be able to quickly find the medicine you need, use it and replace it without to much hassle. Installing a simple light inside your cabinet can save you a lot of trouble in the long run. You can pick up a simple tap light that runs off batteries for next to nothing without having to run any lighting or electricity to your cabinet. Then just tap it when you need it and tap it off when you’re done. It's as simple as that.
Categorize and conquer the mess. Making sense of the madness while organizing your medicine cabinet can be quite difficult to do. Try categorizing what you have that you need to store before you figure out what you are going to store it in. There are so many things that are in a medicine cabinet that it can become quite overwhelming. I have come up with some categories that I use in my own cabinet to help get your started.
- Children's medicine
- Ointments
- First Aid
- Cold and Allergy
- Ears, nose, throat and eyes
- Vitamins
- Adult medicine
- Pain and fever
- All natural medicine
Find a housing system that works well for your space. Once you have your medicine laid out and in categories you will have a better idea of what you will need to store it in. Bins, baskets, drawers and boxes will help you keep your categories separated and keep you from having bottles and boxes falling all over the place. Take a look around your house for some of these or head up to your local store with a list in hand of the approximate size of box you will need for each category.
Assemble and label all categories. Once you have your housing units set up to hold all your different categories you must label label label!! I can't say this enough….here it goes just one more time…LABEL everything. Whether you decide to go with a box system (tops with lids that seal work well), baskets, drawers or baskets you will want to label what you have inside. This will greatly reduce hunting time and help you remember where to put it back when you are finished.
Now that you have a good lighting system installed, you have categorized and conquered, organized and labeled everything in your medicine cabinet there are a few tips I want to go over with you on keeping it that way.
- Put you item back where it goes each and every time you use it.
- Keep the most used items up close and easy to get to.
- Only keep items that you use regularly in your medicine cabinet.
- Go through every 6 months and check expiration dates and dispose of medicine that is past it’s prime.
- Once a month go back through and make sure that everything is in the correct place
Do you have a great tip on how to organize your medicine cabinet that has worked well for you at home?
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