Medicine Cabinet Makeover

I promise I didn't forget about this project. I was sick last week, and though I was wanting to get this done last Wednesday when I bought the baskets, I was too exhausted that night to do it. I did complete it Friday, though! Actually, it only took about 15 minutes.

I said last week I intended to clean out and organize our medicine cabinet. We have a ton of medications and everything was just thrown in there haphazardly. I suspected we had some duplicates due to not being able to see exactly what we had, and I was right. Here's the before shots:

Its a pretty small space, but it was crammed full! Here's a closer shot of the bottom shelf, where the majority of the medication was:

Yikes.

I took everything out and organized it into groups. Pain relievers went in one pile, heartburn medication in another, etc. I threw out quite a bit of medicine, mostly old antibiotics. I discovered I have some really random stuff that I can't remember getting a prescription for, including Oxycontin and nerve pills. Woah! The nerve pills I think were prescribed to me during a severe allergy attack a few years back (when I have an allergy attack, its mainly my skin and nerves that are affected and I itch to the point where I feel like I'm going crazy - its awful), but the oxy? Who knows! That's some powerful stuff and I was surprised to see it in there, but it has my name on it. Just goes to show you that doctors will prescribe anything these days. I don't think I've ever been in enough pain to warrant oxy.

Moving on.... here are the after shots!

Close up of the bottom shelf

I wish I had another shelf in there, because there's a lot of wasted space now. I thought about buying closed containers to store the medication in, and that's probably the safest bet with a toddler in the house. But I knew my husband I would hate having to pull down a box and open it every morning. (We both take medication every morning - and every night for me - for heartburn/acid reflux.)

I thought about separating the medication into children and adult. That seemed like a waste, though, since I only have 3 medications for the baby: Children's Motrin, Tylenol, and Benadryl (all generic). The baskets are categorized by general type of medication they contain: Allergies, Heartburn/Acid Reflux, Pain, Vitamins (you can't see these in the pictures), Sickness (such as cold/flu medication and stomach issue drugs, also not seen in the pictures), random (the nerve pills and other medications reserved for my most severe allergy attacks), and Animal. I didn't realize how much animal medication we had until I organized everything.

I know the labels are not the prettiest in the world. I made them in about 5 minutes while C was running around saying, "what you doin, Mama?" over and over. I figured why waste a bunch of time making beautiful labels when there's a possibility we will absolutely hate this change and nix the idea completely. DH already hates that the pain medication is way at the top and you have to take down the whole basket to get anything out. But honestly, we don't take that much for pain so it doesn't need to be the most accessible.

So far, I am loving this simple change. Its not fancy like some other medicine cabinets I've seen, but that's okay. I'm more likely to keep something simple like this up. Every morning and night when I go to grab my reflux medicine, I don't have to search for it. And I can easily see how much more I have, and how much more Prilosec my husband has, since its all in one tidy basket now. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how my little project turned out! ( :