I admit it… I have been having a love affair my whole adult life… with PRODUCTS. Want to get me excited? Just show me the newest bathroom cleaner, bath gel, furniture polish or hairspray! It doesn’t matter if I have three cans of furniture polish already. I can’t resist the new kind! Yes, I know, it’s a personality defect!!

Giving all these products a home to call their own is a bit of a challenge. They are… EVERYWHERE! The cabinets under and adjacent to the kitchen sink are loaded to capacity with products. So are all the bathroom cabinets. There is an overflow area of lesser-used products in the back bathroom cabinet, and worse yet, an area of hardly-ever-used products in my bedroom closet in a box! What’s a girl to do?
I decided to address the principles of Micro-Zen Cleaning, as illustrated in last month’s article. The first “rathole” area I identified was the bathroom counter. It looked very cluttered. I looked closely, and saw that the biggest concentration of products were lotions of various kinds. This is kind of radical, and I don’t suggest everyone should do it – but I decided to consolidate them. I found a big pump lotion bottle that was almost empty, and I started pouring in the trial-size tubes and bottles. What the heck – they won’t mix in the bottle, they’ll just lie there until their layer is pulled up in the pump! So why not! I managed to get rid of 14 separate bottles and tubes in this manner – fourteen into one!!!
Next I attacked the second biggest offender – makeup! Now, makeup is one of my great loves in life. But too much is a problem. I had previously tried using a divided container, sorting the products into that, but it didn’t seem workable after a few days. I needed to take it further. I think I have finally hit on a solution that is actually neat looking, no products visible, but very accessible! It is a 3-drawer plastic chest I got for $2.99. Someday I plan to decorate it with pretty paper, or perhaps paint it. It measures about 14″ X 9″ X 8″ high. Everything I use to get ready fits into it. The bottom drawer holds hairspray, my toothbrush and miscellaneous stuff. The middle drawer holds my skincare. The top drawer holds the makeup.
A friend had given me a beautiful china rose box with a lid some time ago. It took on the new assignment of holding my contact case and eyeglasses. Pretty and functional.
A wire hanging basket (about $3.00) turned into Product Central for the shower. A pretty little basket was put by the sink to hold my nail brush, hand scrub and hand salve (I’m a gardener!)
Voila! My bathroom counter was transformed! It looks neater now than it has in the eight years we’ve lived here. After a week, there is still nothing cluttering up the counter – my system is working! Now it’s off to the kitchen… but that’s another story!
Written by: Sheila Talley © 2005