One of my co-workers recently had an eye problem that required a bunch of prescription eye drops. Once she was on the other side of it, she pulled out all the eye drops and other prescription meds from her purse one by one… and eventually counted all the way to 17. She had 17 prescription medicines IN HER PURSE ALONE. It was like the Mary Poppins bag of prescriptions.

When she said I should write about de-crapifying my medicine cabinet, I kinda scoffed for a few reasons. First of all, I’m pretty sure I JUST did that. Also – what kind of prescription medicines would I have anyways?? Then I came home and looked at the disaster that was my medicine “cabinet.”

Ridiculous right? This is actually the cabinet underneath my bathroom sink. Apparently I did NOT just organize it. So it was time to DE-CRAPIFY! This is an easy project that you can do in an hour or less if you stay focused. Here we go:

1. Empty out the whole dang thing.
2. Sort through all your medicines and figure out what is expired and TRASH it. Also take a second to go through any toiletries or other products that are kept in the same place and get rid of everything that you don’t use anymore.
3. While you’re at it, make a list of the medicines that you throw out. Prescription meds don’t need to go on the list, but that expired cough syrup definitely should. Once you have your list, you know what you need to buy to keep your medicine cabinet fully stocked as we head into winter. (The things I ALWAYS have in my medicine supply? Zyrtec, Advil, Sinus meds, DayQuil/NyQuil, Neosporin, Hydrogen Peroxide, and a heck ton of band-aids.)
4. Take a trip to Wal-Mart to replenish your supply of whatever you threw out. (I was shocked to see an expiration date from 2003… the year I graduated high school. Meaning that I moved a bottle of pills no less than SEVEN times before realizing it was expired and I needed to throw it away.)
5. Group like things together and re-stock your cabinet. I like to keep the band-aids and the like together near the front, because hello – I use those suckers all the dang time. The other stuff is in a nice little box (clear so I remember what’s in it) closer to the box of my cabinets… right underneath my hot rollers.