Organized Medicine Cabinet

Keeping an organized medicine cabinet isn’t just aesthetically pleasing, but it gives faster access to medicine you have on hand (so you don’t run out and purchase more) when you need it most and keeps potentially harmful medicine out of reach for children.

My medicine cabinet resides in one of my kitchen cabinets – no room in the bathroom and the kitchen is command central for our busy family. Since we moved in a few months ago, everything just got crammed on the shelves and this weekend I finally tackled it.

I had found some snazzy lime green baskets from Target ($5.99 each in stores, $36 for 6 online) and used a gift card to purchase them (worth noting only because had it not been for the gift card I would have just gone to the Dollar Store, which always has a great selection of baskets and bins for various uses). They only had 5 of the baskets in stock at the time and since I knew I had another basket to finish the shelves at home, I decided the mismatched issue was one I could live with.

First, I emptied the whole cabinet and cleared out any empty boxes or expired meds.

Then I sorted into 6 categories:

Kid Meds (Daily)

Mom’s Meds

Cold Meds

Tummy Meds

First Aid

Inventory

I decided to keep children and adult cold meds in the same basket for two reasons: 1. because the daily Kid Meds basket was full already and since I am the only adult in the house I was fine relying on myself to not accidentally give them an adult cold medicine. The Inventory basket was important because I am notorious for stockpiling household items if they are on sale and then forgetting where I put them. Now depending on the demographics in your home or your family’s specific medical needs you can alter the categories to suit your needs.

Rather than do my usual – make a label with a great font and coloring and then laminating it, I decided to just get out my trusty label maker and simply place the labels to the front of each shelf – they will be no problem to remove since we are renting and I didn’t want to do anything permanent.

And if you are looking for even more inspiration, take some tips from two of my favorite domestic goddess on how they organize their families first aid and medicine:

Ask Anna’s Medicine Organization

I Heart Organizing’s Medicine and First Aid Organization

This was a quick project with satisfying results. What are your least favorite areas to organize in the home and we can tackle those together in my next post?