Picture this: You open your bathroom closet and…it collapses. All on you. The towels crash down.
The bottles cascade off of the shelves. Welcome to my life…for way too long. I would cram towels on any shelf that would accept them, shove as many bottles into any reachable space, and hope for the best when I’d inevitably step on something pointy while searching for a new roll of toilet paper at 2am.
It all came to a head last spring. I was rushing to grab an “extra” towel for our guests arriving later that day when my top shelf spectacularly collapsed.
Three mismatched washcloths, a forgotten hairdryer, and dozens of shampoo bottles crash landed on my feet.
Standing barefoot in my robe, scooping up toiletries while also hearing the doorbell ring was the moment I knew I had to change my ways. Closets under bathroom sinks are odd spaces. They’re usually incredibly narrow.
They’re often not even shaped like a rectangle. And, for some reason, they’re almost always super humid. Plus, we expect them to hold all items big and small from huge bath towels to tiny toothpaste tubes.
So, maybe your traditional storage ideas won’t work for this space. I tried that route and quickly realised my mistake. I bought one of those “fits all” closet organizers that promised to solve all of my issues.
Spoiler: it didn’t fit. And returning it was more of a headache than the assembly was. So, I started from scratch.
I actually looked at what I was storing in this closet. Towels. All kinds of towels.
Bath sheets. Hand towels. Washcloths.
All of those extra toiletries – like backup bottles of shampoo, body wash, toilet paper (let me tell you, you have an obscene amount of toilet paper). Hair tools. First aid.
Cleaning products. And, ahem…a collection of hotel soaps I’ve been hoarding “for someday” for the past decade. Investing in some proper shelving was step number one to creating an actually functional space.
I know, duh, Alex. Hear me out though! Most bathroom closets only come equipped with two shelves, and those two shelves are normally in the worst places possible.
I bought three tension-mounted wire shelves from Closet Maid (for around £45 total) that allowed me to move the heights of shelves to work with the items that needed to be stored on each specific shelf. Life changing. Now I have a shelf that is towel-height to accommodate folded towels.
I have a shelf that’s just the right height to store bottles that won’t tip over. And I have a lower shelf to house those bulkier necessities. Okay, towels.
How to fold towels was where things got really exciting. I had been folding towels my entire life. The way my mum showed me when I was little.
Don’t get me wrong, it works. But it takes up wayyyy too much space. Then I discovered this hotel fold towel trick.
Basically you fold your towels in thirds long-wise, then roll them…and just barely roll them. It cuts down your space by about 40%. AND, they look WAY more luxurious piled next to each other.
My bath towels went from taking up a whole shelf to nesting with hand towels and still looking tidy. Smaller items. All of those bottles, tubes, and lids that magically seem to multiply when you aren’t looking.
Time for some drawer organizers. But not any organizers. Clear ones.
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I bought some simple, straightforward acrylic bins from IKEA’s GODMORGON collection. Because they’re clear, I can actually see what I own. No more grabbing another bottle of backup shampoo when I’ve secretly stashed three bottles at the bottom of my closet.
I have small bins for travel sized items. Larger bins for full sized bottles. Labels are great, but being able to see inside the bin works 99% of the time.
Next up? Vertical space. When we think about shelves, we typically think horizontally.
But there’s a lot of vertical space at the top and bottom of most closets that goes unused. I added an over-the-door wire organizer to the inside of my closet door. The simple, clear pocket version that houses all of those “miscellaneous” things.
Hair ties, nose hair trimmers, travel bottles, the lip balm you swear you bought but can never find when your lips are parched. I spent about £12 on it and may have saved myself 20 minutes every week TRYING to find things. Another mistake I made was keeping too much in the immediate-grab zone.
Everything at eye level seemed like it made sense. Store the stuff you use the most within reach and put the seasonal or back-up stuff up higher or down lower. Wrong.
Now I keep the day-to-day items that I use (our current shampoo, the towels we reach for most often) within easy reach. Everything else (Backup supplies, seasonal stuff like that fancy sea salt scrub I “save” for holidays) gets moved up and down. Humidity sucks.
I didn’t deal with it until I started noticing some of my towels started smelling like…old gym socks. Even after I washed them! Luckily a quick fix was had entering DampRid.
I popped one of those containers that absorb moisture into my closet and haven’t had a problem since. It was about £3 and will last you forever. Toss it behind a shelf or in a corner where you can’t see it but it can still do its job.
I am OBSESSED with decanting beauty products into uniform containers. It may sound extra. But please try it.
Hear me out. Thing is, all of those original bottles come in different shapes and sizes. They never line up and stack nicely.
I bought some uniform pump dispenser bottles and squeeze bottles so that now everything fits together. You can even buy products in bulk and refill as you go. Saving you money, people.
And honestly, the thing that made the biggest difference was making my closet “pretty”. If it looked cluttered and messy (think towels crumpled on the floor, bottles lined crazily on a shelf, etc.) I tended not to use that closet and would let laundry pile up. When my closet was neat and tidy ( towels neatly folded, containers stacked together) I found myself wanting to keep it that way.
Kind of like how you don’t want to make your kitchen dirty – you want to keep it clean. Now it’s been half a year since I began reorganizing my bathroom closet. You could say it’s been life-changing.
No, seriously.
I open that cabinet and it’s glorious. It’s not perfect. (I may or may not have extremely OCD tendencies when it comes to folding towels.
We still have that souvenir soap collection. Life happens.) But it WORKS. I know where everything is.
Nothing falls on me when I open that sucker. Guests can grab a towel without having to dig through heaps of laundry. Overall it’s way more functional.
All this cost me less than £100. And a lot of that was actual shelving. The hard work came one Saturday afternoon.
Sometimes the biggest change comes from smallest shifts.
