The Easiest Way to Declutter Your Bathrooms (with Free Printable Decluttering Calendar)

Declutter your bathrooms with my free printable decluttering calendar and have completely organized bathrooms and linen closet by the end of the month!

Ready to tackle the bathrooms and linen closet? Though these spaces are not usually huge, they can get surprisingly cluttered (in our house anyway!), so this month we’re going to remedy that.

If you haven’t joined in with one of our monthly challenges before, the goal is to take one area of the house and break it down into little decluttering baby steps so that it is easy to manage and stick to but still gets you great results!

How to Declutter Bathrooms

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.

Whether you have one bathroom in your home or multiple, this month’s challenge should make it easy to get rid of everything you don’t need and put the remaining items back in an organized way. You may even find yourself looking for excuses to hang out in the bathroom by the time you’ve finished… who knew?! 😉

You can snag the decluttering calendar for the bathrooms by clicking on the button below.

[Pssstttt… You can see every single one of our free printables– more than 300 pages worth– over in our library of free organizing printables!]

You’ll notice a few things when you download your decluttering calendar:

There is a simple task to complete every other day.

I know life can get crazy and schedules fill up, so by assigning a task only every other day, you essentially have two days to complete each one. That way if you get busy and miss a day or you have a lot of a particular item and it ends up taking a little longer than you expected, you have a built in day to catch up and won’t fall behind.

The calendar is undated for a reason.

I intentionally didn’t put specific days of the week on the calendar. The October calendar runs from day 1-31, but I didn’t include a line that says “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.” on purpose so that the calendar could be used for any year (or any month, for that matter)!

Feel free to just use this calendar as a guide.

If you find yourself with extra time one day and know you’ll be busy in future days, you can definitely do 2 or more of the tasks on one day, check them off, and then pick up again after your busy days have passed. The calendar is meant to get you started down the right path and give reminders of what to do next; it doesn’t have to be a hard and fast rule.

Quick Tips for Decluttering Your Bathrooms

I thought I would lay out the process I like to use when decluttering our bathrooms. You can feel free to follow it exactly, tweak it to fit your liking, or completely disregard it and use your own strategy!

1. Gather up all of the items from the day’s category.

With all of the little cabinets and drawers in the bathroom, items can easily end up everywhere! (Particularly if you have little people who are still learning how to put things back in their place…not that that ever happens around here… 😉 )

I find it easiest to go through and gather up everything from the category I’m decluttering that day so I can see all of the items in one spot. That way I can tell if I have way too many of something and can more easily decide what to get rid of.

2. Declutter like crazy!

If your house is anything like mine, I sometimes find the craziest things in our bathroom drawers and cabinets! This is a great opportunity to get rid of anything we don’t love or use often. We can either throw it away if it is expired, broken, or worn out or donate/sell it if it could be useful to someone else.

3. Put items back in an organized way.

The great thing about decluttering by category is that once you’ve gotten rid of everything you don’t need, it’s easy to see what you have left and which size/shape of container would be best to corral your items (if necessary).

Since bathroom vanity drawers tend to be deep and narrow, I like to use bins within the drawers to separate my items and keep everything from falling over.

For bathroom cabinets, I try to maximize my space by utilizing stacking drawers or open front bins. I try to stay away from stacking lidded bins, just because it becomes a pain to get to the items on the bottom. So then it’s tempting to avoid using those items or to just throw things back into the cabinet instead of taking the time to put them back where they go.

What if my linen closet is tiny?

Oh, the linen closet. Most linen closets are not huge, but the one in our current house is especially tiny. (Even smaller than the one we had in our townhouse!) It is actually only half depth– not even a full closet!

Because it is so small, I really only have room to store our towels in the linen closet space, so I had to get creative. I now keep sheets in a cute bin in the closet of the room they go with. Each bed has two sets of sheets– the set that is currently on the bed, and one extra set in a bin in the closet. That’s it.

You can spot our extra sheets in the wire bin on the bottom shelf in our closet.

In our old house, I also used to store medications in our linen closet because I had read that the humidity in the bathroom wasn’t the best for them. Since I didn’t have room to do that in our current house’s linen closet, I use bins on some extra shelves in my closet for meds as well.

4. Give yourself a reward!

I know I can become a little more motivated if I promise myself a reward when I’ve finished all of my decluttering tasks! You can use the “Notes” section of the decluttering calendar to decide what your reward will be. Some ideas may be…

5 Ways to Maintain Your Beautifully Decluttered Bathroom

Now that we’ve worked hard to declutter our bathrooms, the last thing we want to do is fill it right back up with more clutter! I know this can be hard, especially if you have little kiddos that have trouble putting things back where they go. It can definitely be a battle in our house!

Some ideas you could try to help everyone in the family to put items back:

• Involve them in the organizing process and let them weigh in on where things should go, particularly in their own bathroom. This lets them have some ownership over the space and makes them more likely to put things back.
  
• Use labels. I use my Cricut Explore cutting machine to label many of the bins in our bathrooms, and I love this handheld label maker as well.
  
• Work bathroom straightening into your daily routine. This has been something we’ve been working on for a while in our house, but I feel like the boys are finally starting to catch on! We’ve tried to create the habit of hanging their towels up every morning (We use hooks instead of towel bars to make this a little easier.), putting all of their toothbrushes/toothpaste back in their designated holders after they use them, and rinsing off the sink/vanity counter when they’re done brushing their teeth so it doesn’t get gross.
  
• Periodically declutter. Old makeup, expired medications, and half used toiletries can pile up over time. Every few months, take inventory and toss as needed.
  
• Avoid overbuying. Hair care and beauty products can be tempting, but to keep the clutter to a minimum, we only purchase these items when we truly need them.

That’s it! It’s a simple process, but I’ve found that having a guide– like a decluttering calendar– to walk me through it makes me more likely to follow through and stick to the plan.

Want to save this post to revisit later? Be sure to pin the image below so you can find it easily!

Which decluttering themes would be most helpful for future monthly challenges? Let me know in the comments!

Happy Decluttering!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.