Real Organized Cleaning Supplies

Today, we are going to tackle getting our cleaning supplies organized. I know it isn’t all that exciting, but if you are a part of my Real Organized series, trust me there is a method to my madness. By having your cleaning supplies organized and having a schedule for what cleaning/laundry you will do when you will be able to get these things done quickly and get them over with so you can move on to the fun stuff in life…which for me is definitely NOT cleaning.

As long as we are going to take some time to organize our cleaning supplies, we might as well add some color and some fun….or is it just me that likes color and fun with boring tasks?

This post is part of my #RealOrganized series. If you want the whole series, just click the graphic above or you can click here to sign up to have each week of this series and all the freebies directly emailed to you. The goal of this series is for you to be able to organize some of the things that, as moms, we have to deal with on a yearly, monthly, weekly, or daily basis. By getting these things organized we can free up time in our week as well as space in our homes and minds. The main goal is to feel more organized and less clouded as moms so we can find time and space to spend with our family as well as do things we love and find fulfilling.

Today for your 30 to 60-minute task, I want you to organize your cleaning supplies. I know….it couldn’t sound any less exciting, but I promise it will help you in the end.

The first thing you need to do is decide where you plan to keep your cleaning supplies. I highly recommend that you keep them all in one place. I know it may seem easier to keep some in the kitchen and others in the laundry room and still more in the bathroom, but I don’t think it is a good idea for a few reasons.

When you keep them all over the place it is hard to keep track of what supplies you have and what you need. For me, and maybe for you, there is nothing worse than finding the time and psyching myself up to clean(since I hate cleaning) and going to do the job and finding that I don’t have the supplies I need. Uugh!

If you keep everything in one central location it makes it easy to grab everything you need and to go do your task for the day. No running to the laundry room for rags and the kitchen for one type of cleaner and the bathroom for another. You will find it to be a time saver.

For me, the location where I keep my cleaning supplies is my laundry room.

Do you remember my laundry room? I’ve shown it a few times on the blog. I showed you how I reorganized it a few years ago. More recently, I’ve shown you the fun DIY wording I put on the cabinet doors as well as the wreath I made. 

When you organize your cleaning supplies, you need to come up with something that will work for everyone in your house. Not just you. We want to get our families involved in helping (or at least I do) and that means that they need to be able to access and keep organized.

Until today, I don’t think I’ve ever shown you the inside of the cabinets. They tend to get a little messy because the doors close easily and they are tall and hard to reach. The problem I had with our cleaning supplies is that they just got thrown in there. Often the newest thing I bought would get used before we were done with the old one or we would run out of things and no one would tell me. It was also hard for the kids to reach and find cleaning supplies. I want them to be involved and to help with cleaning, so it just wasn’t working.

I also have organized and re-organized this cabinet what feels like a hundred times. No one keeps up with it. I needed to come up with some kind of system that would force people to keep it organized. AND I think I did! Woot! Woot!

For me, the system I came up with was to use bins to corral things in the laundry room cabinet. It has worked well now for over a year. Yay!

Depending on your space, bins may not work that well. If you are organizing under a kitchen sink, this pull-out drawer (affiliate link) has worked wonders in other homes I’ve lived in and works great under my kitchen sink now for organizing all the wraps and bags.

I found the cheap square bins you can see above at the dollar spot at Target. Then I found these plastic magazine holders (affiliate link) and decided they would work perfect in the space to hold supplies and make it easy for everyone to keep things organized.

I won’t be able to tell you exactly what will work in your space. Just get creative and use things that you think will work regardless of if that is their originally intended purpose. Also, make sure you are thinking about the ease of use for yourself and your family. You want to try to create a fool proof system, which there really is no such thing, but after quite a few attempts, this is finally working for us.

Another tip when you are organizing your supplies, get rid of things you no longer like or use. Add things to the grocery list that you need.

While you are at it group like items together.

I grouped mine by laundry, scrubbing products, products for the floor, and products to clean things (like all-purpose and glass cleaners).

Now, you may have noticed that I didn’t re-organize the rest of the cabinet. I did that because I wanted to keep this quick and easy and stick to just cleaning supplies. I often start with a simple task and let it blossom into 15 other projects and days worth of work. I just wanted to keep this simple and quick. You can do the same. We can work on the other stuff another time as another small project.

OK…so it totally drove me nuts to not organize it and leave it like that, especially when it came time to photograph it, but I left it anyway. Guess what, I’m glad I did (aside from the fact that the pictures would look better if I had). It kept the project simple and do-able. I like that and that fits my current busy life.

Once you have found your space, gathered all your supplies and figured out how you plan to organize them, you need to put them in the bins or in the space in a way that you think will work to keep them organized.

To give you an idea of groupings as well as how these magazine holders work, this is my scrub bin. It has my wood cleaning spray, toilet cleaner, Bon Ami as well as the toothbrush I use for detail cleaning. You can see how the bin easily holds the cleaning supplies and allows me to group things together. It will make it easier to find what we need. That is the point of organizing to me.

The final step is to label your supplies. I know this may seem like an extra step, but labeling things will make it WAY more likely that both you and those other people who live with you will put things away where they go. That will save you time and help you quickly know when you need additional supplies. It is a win-win for everyone. Add tags to everything!

I added new labels to the baskets in my laundry room as well. It helps me and the rest of my family know exactly where things go.

I’m serious, label things! It will make a big difference for you and your family. There is little to no confusion about where things go and you won’t have to answer the questions about where things are located. 

That is it. Organizing is not rocket science. I know to a lot of people it feels that way, but if you enjoy creating and crafting, just use that same creativity and come up with ideas and solutions that you think will work for you. Then try them. If they don’t work, try something else. None of it has to be expensive or time-consuming.

In the end, while organizing cleaning supplies may not seem earth shattering or as though it is going to revolutionize your life (and it won’t), it will help with the overall goal. The overall goal of your taking some control of your home and family life and feeling less frazzled.

Between having organized your calendar, when you clean, and now having the supplies organized you are well on your way to feeling less frazzled and more like you are able to keep up. I promise, if you keep at these small tasks, the overall effect will be great!

I’ve got a whole set of labels for you to use to organize your cleaning supplies. It is all in one file and you have pink, blue and gold labels to select from. Yay! I hope they make the process easier for you. Just sign into the box below to snag your set of labels.

So what do you think about having organized cleaning supplies? What are your tips/ideas? Please share so others can read your great ideas and tips!!

I’ve got more cleaning ideas for you on my Pinterest Real Cleaning board.