How to Organize Your Medicine Cabinet in 5 Easy Steps

Do you have a messy medicine cabinet? Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. It seems like every time I need to find something, it’s hidden at the bottom of a pile or crammed into a tiny corner. This can be really frustrating, especially when you’re in a hurry.

That’s why today we’re going to talk about how to organize your medicine cabinet in 5 easy steps!

Medicine Cabinet Organization Tips

Medicine organization isn’t the first thing people think of when they go to organize their house, but it can be super important. You don’t want to be digging through first aid supplies to find a band-aid while someone is hurt or struggling to locate some cough drops when someone is sick.

Here are my favorite medicine cabinet organization ideas to help you get your medicine cabinet organized!

1. Find a cabinet space.

You may already have a designated medicine cabinet for your first aid supplies and medications, but if you don’t, then this is the first step.

I know some people like to use the corner cabinet in their home since it’s sometimes hard to store other supplies in that cabinet, but just find a space that makes the most sense for your home.

It’s okay if it’s a small space, or even if it’s only one shelf in a cabinet. Not everyone has room in their homes for full medicine cabinets, and some families might not need that much space anyway!

If your bathroom has a medicine cabinet door behind the mirror, you can use that, or one of the shelves in a linen closet, or a couple of shelves in one of your kitchen cabinets.

Whether it’s the bathroom, kitchen, or somewhere else in the house, just pick somewhere that makes sense to you, has enough room for organizing what you need, and is easily accessible.

Now that you’ve selected a medicine cabinet, you can see how much space you’ll have when you organize medicine.

(Keep in mind that while you want your family members to know where the medicine cabinet is, that’s not the case for little ones. So if you have little kids, you want your medicine cabinet to be high enough that little hands can’t gain access to it.

Note: I bought this drawer unit at Michael’s years ago and they no longer carry it. So I tried to find some drawer units that were similar. I hope that helps!

2. Sort through all your medical supplies.

The next thing you’ll want to do when you’re organizing medications is to take everything out and sort it into categories. This will help you figure out what you need and what can be stored elsewhere in your house.

Go through everything first and condense down what you can. Do you have several bags of cough drops? Put them all together.

Look at expiration dates. Is something expired? Throw it out. You don’t want to hold on to expired medicines.

Check all of your first aid supplies and narrow them down to what you need, what can still be used, and try to condense things together when possible.

3. Sort your first aid supplies into categories.

Now that you’ve gone through your medicine cabinet and only have the medicine you actually need, you can sort them into categories. This will make it easier to organize so you can find what you need when you’re in a hurry.

Some common categories for medicines are:

• Prescription Medications
• Vitamins and Supplements
• Bandages and Other First Aid Supplies
• Cough Drops or Cough Syrup
• Cold and Flu Remedies
• Digestive Meds or Aids
• Pain Relief Medication
• Allergy Medicine
• Fever Reducers
• Bandages and Wraps
• Creams and Ointments

Get as specific as you can when you’re organizing your various medicines. I would also suggest grouping adult pill bottles and medication and keeping it away from kids’ medicine and vitamins. If you use essential oils, you can also make a separate category for those!

4. Use storage bins to organize medicine.

Once you have your categories, it’s time to organize your medicine into different storage bins inside your medicine cabinet. This will help you to see everything at a glance and make it easier to find what you need.

I like to use clear storage bins so I can easily see the contents, but if you have a specific color that helps you remember what’s inside, go for it!

If you don’t have lots of space and you’re looking for better storage solutions, you can also get a larger first aid box with smaller compartments. This will help save on space since it will have multiple areas and categories built-in.

Look for special organizers or convert other items from the dollar store into an organizer – like a tackle box or something like that! Repurposing old containers can be a great idea for storage solutions that won’t break the bank!

How to Organize Your Storage Bins

Once you’ve picked out storage bins for the supplies in your medicine cabinet, it’s time to use a bin for each category. Like I said earlier, I’d store adult medications in a separate container from kids medicine.

Store cold medicine in one area, digestive medicines in another container, etc. Store and organize first aid supplies by type as well. For example, put burn medications or patches in one area, band-aids in another area, and so on. Use another bin for any essential oils, one for pain relief… you get the idea.

If your medicine cabinet is shallow (like most medicine cabinets that are in mirrors) you might not have enough depth or room on your shelves for containers full of medicine. In that case, just organize by shelf. Store the kids vitamins on one shelf (probably the one they can reach) and group the categories together on the shelf as best you can.

Get a lazy Susan for deeper shelves.

If you have deeper shelves and it’s hard to reach things in the back, get a lazy Susan! Then you can easily rotate it to get the medicine you need!

Get magnetic containers.

If you’re using a bathroom mirror medicine cabinet and there’s enough space when you shut the medicine cabinet doors, one great solution would be to use magnetized containers. (Or just any container that you add a magnet to.)

While you might not want to store medications in this container in case they slipped off, you could definitely put cotton balls, band aids, wraps, or other little first aid items in them.

5. Make labels for all of your medical supplies.

The final step to medicine cabinet organization is one of my favorites. When it comes to organization ideas, this one is pretty straightforward, but it’s a total game-changer.

Making labels for your medicine cabinet will help you to know exactly where everything is supposed to go. And, it’ll make it easier for other family members to find what they need as well. You won’t have to worry about anyone grabbing the wrong medications or vitamins!

You can buy labels or make your own pretty easily. You can find blank ones in most stores and handwrite the labels or, if you want to get fancy with it, then I have two words for you: cricut machine.

If you want to get creative, you could even try making chalkboard labels that you can erase and reuse as needed! That’s one of my favorite tips because then the uses for them are basically endless! Who doesn’t love a reuseable label?

When it comes to organizing medications, putting a label on the containers in your cabinet will help you know where everything is so you can quickly grab the medications you need. Plus, it will help keep them organized since everyone in the house will know right where to put them!

Get your medicine cabinets organized!

Now you know how to organize medicine and first aid items in your medicine cabinet! It’s not too hard, right? And the medicine cabinet organization ideas we gave are really easy to implement.

With organization, the same steps can be applied basically anywhere to get you the organized home we all dream of. So a lot of those great storage solutions and practical tips you use to organize other shelves or cabinets can be used in your medicine cabinet organization as well!

So whether your store your medications on shelves in the bathroom, the kitchen, or some other cabinet space, getting it organized will make a big difference.

Organizing your medicine cabinet will not only help your physical health, since you’ll know where everything in the cabinet is, but it will help your mental health t It feels amazing to know right where everything is the moment you open your medicine cabinet doors! I know you’ll feel that too!