Ikea Hack: Bathroom Counter Top Clean-Up

Obviously I'm on break from school, because I'm cleaning like a maniac.  I've actually done 7 loads of laundry today.  One huge accomplishment that I'm super excited about was finding a cure for the clutter on my bathroom counter top.  

My little black rack there is actually a spice rack from Ikea.  They are in the kitchen knick-knack section.  I've seen people use the racks for holding books (which I've got them holding books in all of the kids' rooms, and in my office), but I decided I would actually consider using one of these spice racks to hold...ummm...spices.

So, back to Ikea to pick up a couple more wracks for spices. I decided on a whim to see if I could get my hair spray and other beauty paraphernalia to fit in the rack. I was stoked to see that I could indeed use the spice rack to hold all of the things that make me look and smell good! I put my 9 year old in charge of putting the rack together and helping to paint it with a glossy black paint to match the decor in my bathroom/bedroom.

 As you can see, for the past couple of years I've just been using a basket on the counter top.  And as you can see, I stink at putting stuff back in the basket!  And as if having a messy bathroom counter top isn't bad enough, this counter top happens to be located outside the main bathroom and in our bedroom (you can see our bed in the mirror).

Ta-Da!  Neatness.  I also went through all of the drawers and cabinets and weeded through things that needed to find another home.  I'm so excited about my clean counter top...I'm sure I'll leap out of bed at 5am to get ready for work tomorrow!

Why is there paint on my mirror?

When we purchased our home, the previous homeowners left a huge, framed mirror on the wall hung horizontally, as though a dresser should be beneath it. Up until last year, we left the mirror where it was and put our bedroom dresser below it. However, decided sometime last year to do away with our dressers in our master bedroom, and instead put in two giant wardrobes with deep drawers for easier clothing storage. This left the question of what to do with the mirror?

My hubby took the mirror and turned it on it's side and installed it on the wall as a full length mirror. He had to take the framing off of it to make it fit. This was ONE YEAR AGO.

Yes, that's the glue that surrounded the mirror from the framing. And, yes, it stayed on their for over a year, just waiting for someone to scratch it off. It's one of those things that I see so often, I forget it's there. Until one day last week, when our youngest asked why we had paint on our mirror. I was like, "huh?", and when he showed me, I was dumbfounded - has that really been that way this whole time?

So, very proud of myself, I got out a hand-dandy scraper and scraped it all off nice and clean. This brings me to having two issues....

1. How many things do I walk by that need to be fixed and I just don't notice?

2. Why hasn't my husband fixed this yet? :)

You can't eat healthy foods if you can't find it!

I'm sure we've all heard stories about people who have eaten expired food and become deathly ill. Well, sadly, I was looking through my pantry and came across quite a few expired items. Out came a trash bag and more stuff from my house went into the landfill, sadly. Currently, our pantry is a couple of cheap stand up cabinets from Target. Eventually, we'd like to get some nice IKEA cabinets for this wall, but alas, there seems to be too much month at the end of our money, so that project will have to come at another time.

I took everything out of the pantry last week and tossed anything that was expired. For more information about expired foods you could look here at this article about what all those sell-by, display until and expires on dates mean.

After putting the pantry all back together, I moved the fruit rack from one of the kitchen counters (the kids couldn't reach it) down to a lower surface for easy after school access.

I also went through all of our dried fruits, pretzels, banana chips and other fun school lunch snacks and packaged them in sandwich baggies. I realize this is a huge area that I need to work on, because while it is more convenient for me to just grab a baggie and send it in a lunchbox it's not as green as I'd like to be with our lunch packings. I use a laptop lunchbox for my lunch when I bring lunch to work. I'm considering purchasing one for each of the kids, but again, it's more of a want than a need right now.
Anyhow, I thought I'd share my tiny pantry make-under and the easy access snack areas to chase the "I'm hungry" monsters away after school and to ease the lunch-packing rush in the morning. I pack 15 lunches weekly and could use any tips or trips you got!

Medicine Cabinet Make-Under

In my quest to become more organized around the house, this weekend, I did some work in the master bathroom. I will confess that what really prompted this clean-up was a sick (whiny) husband and a sick 8 year old. After a lengthy discussion with the hubby that an 8 year old is not an adult and therefore does not take adult cold medicine, I realized I needed to really spell things out for him.

A side note here: one thing that I am finally figuring out about myself is that after nearly 10 years of battling Coast Guard schedules, now that my DH is home forever, I'm having a hard time realizing that he really does live here full-time. Now, some of you might nod and agree and some of you might think I'm nuts. To just throw it right out there, I think in my mind that I'm the only one that can do things right around here, because after all, I'm the one that holds down the fort all the time. Now I know that way of thinking will destroy our marriage and put a divide into the partnership that parenting should be, and so I am working to kick those thoughts out of my head. And I find the more empowered my hubby feels to help, the more confident he feels about helping around the house.

So back in the bathroom - I don't actually keep in medicine in the medicine cabinet. I keep hydrogen peroxide, a shower cleaner spray and extra razor blades in there. I keep all of the husbands daily medicines and all of the vitamins in a cabinet in the kitchen, since humidity and heat are bad for most pills.

For Christmas, a friend gave me a tackle box with 4 clear plastic boxes in it, thinking that I would use it for crafty things. In my master bedroom, I have an alcove with a sink/mirror leading into the bathroom (shower, commode, sink/mirror). So essentially, I have two sink/mirror combos for the master bath. In the sink/mirror combo alcove, the sink is a nice sink that looks like a dresser and has drawers. I decided to take the clear plastic boxes and clean up the drawers in the alcove. I tossed out all old make-up and anything that I wouldn't really wear.

Plastic bin#1:

- Individually packaged cold medications - I will confess, we use the same few meds in our house.

Plastic bin#2:

- Different sized band aids, neosporin, a couple of ace bandages, - pretty much a first aid kit for scrapes and bleeding. I can now grab this and go when we are going camping, bike riding, etc.

Plastic bin#3:

- Hair pretties - no-hurt elastics, bobby pins, sweaty-bands, etc.

Plastic bin#4:

- Fun/Funky jewelry. I don't wear a lot of jewelry - but I do have a few cute necklaces and holiday things.

Now, I have a clear top drawer of this vanity, which I have all of my makeup neatly organized in, and so instead of having it on the top of the vanity, I just open the top drawer and work out of it.

In the end, I threw away an entire garbage bag of old/broken stuff. I tried to figure out how to recyle, but make-up and broken hair dryers really only belong in the trash.

On thing I really need help with in the bathroom, is cleaning my shower. There is a difference between organized and CLEAN. I use a Magic Clean eraser on my shower doors, but I can't seem to get my shower tiles as clean as I'd like them to be. What are you using on your shower? I'm sure some of my problem is that I hate to clean the shower, and so it only happens once every couple of weeks.