Bathroom Organization, Pinterest Style

I don't love cleaning (how many people really do?) and I am a bit of a hoarder, so spring cleaning at our house always starts first with spring organizing. I love making the different areas of our home work for us and our stuff and our habits, which means allowing for a little bit of laziness for my husband, our two young kids, and me... mostly me. If it is too much work, none of us will do it. So, rather than making new and totally different habits, I prefer to just slightly alter existing (lazy) habits so that the odds of the new habit "sticking" are greatly improved.

Case in point: my bathroom counter. This is our shared family bathroom, so everyone's stuff is here. Most of it is mine. And I am a habitual leaver-outer. If there is something I use every day, I am very unlikely to put it away if it takes more than half a second. Combine this with my 18-month-old daughter who is a habitual drawer-emptier (thus making drawer storage undesirable), and our bathroom counter was a disaster every day.

I should be more embarrassed about this photo than I am. It is staged but not exaggerated. In reality, there would have been a couple more items on the counter and the counter would have been waaaay dirtier because you can't wipe it down very well with all your stuff all over it, right? ;)

I loved this user-uploaded idea on Pinterest, and I love IKEA. (Not sponsored, just true and honest love.) For around $10 and 10 minutes installation time, I made a great countertop transformation:

All of these items are part of the Bygel organization series.

Love it! The rail gives me a place to hang the squirt bottle I use to do my daughters hair and my glasses, and I can clip smaller things like tweezers and nail clippers right on the side of the bins. I can slide my smaller mirror down between the rail and the bin (safe from my my narcissist children who have broken 2 mirrors in the past year. so much bad luck!). 

With the smaller items off the counter, I just had my hair stuff left. I grabbed some magazine/file holders (on-hand and ugly, but you can get cuter ones pretty much anywhere) to organize hair products and styling tools under the sink (thanks to the idea from Keeley MacGuire found via Pinterest).

I still have to overcome my laziness and take the time to put things away in their places, but they *have* places and designating places cleared up a lot of space for other things.

Another area of frustration in our bathroom was the bath toys. They were just sitting next to the tub in various bins and baskets. We had quite a few and our kids loved them all, but they almost never played with them because they couldn't reach them from in the tub and I hated the puddles of water on the floor from them tossing dripping toys back in the baskets.

Inspired by this user-uploaded pin, I grabbed an extra shower curtain rod and hit the dollar store for three baskets and a set of shower curtain rings and now we have this:

So far, it is working great. A small amount of water stays in the baskets, but it hasn't caused any problems yet. If it does, I plan to just drill a couple extra holes lower on the baskets so the water can drain better. The only concern is that our petite little girl can't reach the toys in the baskets without standing up, so we have her choose her toys first while we are there holding her hand and then she can play without standing up and risking a fall. We might move the rod lower, as well.

The only problem with the new organization is that it makes the other clutter spots in our house that much more noticeable and irritating. But little by little, we are getting used to our space and making it work for us... and our laziness... ;)

What have you been organizing lately? I love new ideas, so please share!

-Lorene