Mini Mission Monday is about finding ten minutes a day to declutter. To make it easy for you, each Monday I set seven declutter missions, one for each day of the week for you to follow. It takes the guess work out of decluttering and makes it easy and “fun” for you to achieve some quick decluttering.
This week’s missions are inspired by what I store in my bathroom. If you have more than one bathroom focus on the one with the most clutter or spread them over both. No offence ladies but it is usually the females in the house with the most bathroom clutter. Be they the mother figure or the daughters from teenage up. However all but maybe Monday’s apply to the guys as well. So lets have at it.
Monday – Go through your makeup items. Declutter any you don’t use anymore.
Tuesday – Declutter any toiletry products you aren’t likely to use because you tried them but didn’t like them. Shampoos, conditioners, bady wash, moisturisers etc. Perhaps donate them to a women’s or men’s shelter.
Wednesday – If you have more towels than necessary declutter a few. They take years to wear out so you won’t be leaving yourself short. Donate good ones to a thrift shop and shabby ones to an animal shelter or the like.
Thursday – Declutter as many items as possible cluttering up your shower recess. Only keep in there what you use very regularly, as excess items get mouldy and soap scummed which can cause odours and harbour germs.
Friday – Declutter any decor items in your bathroom that only serve to collect dust and mildew. Particularly those waxy candles attracting dust on the side of the bathtub. Artificial flower arrangements are also big dust and mildew attractors.
Saturday – Declutter any drugs or first-aid items whether stored in your bathroom or elsewhere.
Sunday - Sunday is reserved for contemplating one particular item, of your choice that is proving difficult for you to declutter. Whether that be for sentimental reasons, practical reasons, because the task is laborious or simply unpleasant, or because the items removal requires the cooperation of another person. That last category may mean that the item belongs to someone else who has to give their approval, it could also mean there is a joint decision to be made or it could mean that the task of removing it requires assistance from someone else. There is no need to act on this contemplation immediately, it is more about formulating a plan to act upon or simply making a decision one way or another.
Good luck and happy decluttering
Eco Tip for the Day
Don’t accept free promotional products that you have no use for. Accepting these just encourages the continuation of this practice while the environment would be healthier without the manufacture of cheap throwaway or needless items like these usually are.
It matters not how fast I go, I hurry faster when I’m slow
Hi Colleen! I have cleared my bathroom (the 02 of them) a while back, but it is a area that needs constant maintenance. I have paired down on shampoos and hair/body creams a lot because i found that I don’t care very much about using loads of things on my hair and body. Still, there is always something to be improved. As for medicines I have read somewhere that they should not be stored in the bathroom because the humidity alters their components and the medicine will become ineffective or cause harm.
Great set of mini missions!
Andreia – it makes sense about storing medicines. I have always kept ours in a cupboard above the refrigerator but it has become messy lately. I will give it some attention too tonight.
I also don’t keep the medicine in the bathroom, but I do keep bandaids in there!
Medicine (and also perfume which also can’t bear the warmth and humidity of the bathroom) is stored in my bedroom, which is the coolest room in our apartment.
That is useful information Andréia, I was unaware that storing medications in bathrooms was an issue. I never used to do this because I had plenty of room in the pantry but I have been since moving into our new place. I had better come up with an alternative home for them. It shouldn’t be hard we don’t have many.
If there is one area I’ve been really good about decluttering and maintaining, it is the bathroom. Though my teen daughter and I share a bathroom, neither of us is very into beauty products. We use different products in terms of shampoo, conditioner, and such because we have different needs – she has oily hair and a sensitive scalp, i have normal hair and dry scalp, etc. Still, we have what we need and use. It’s made keeping the bathroom neat so easy.
I don’t store my makeup in the bathroom. I store it in a travel makeup bag in one of my bedroom closets – yes, I have two closets. No, I don’t know why the room is set up that way.
The medicine closets have both recently been purged and organized.
Now, if I could just find the energy to finish painting my bathroom and recaulk my bathtub…lol.
Hi Rachel, I also don’t keep my makeup in my bathroom. I have a drawer in my bedroom for that. I must admit this blog post was inspired by someone else’s bathroom, who shall remain nameless because she would be mortified. Also my bathroom was one of the areas that was decluttered by necessity when moving home to Australia from the USA. It has stayed uncluttered ever since. Have much smaller bathrooms has deemed that a necessity.
I am also glad to say i will never have to paint either of my bathrooms as they are completely tiled. The ceilings however may need it some day.
Colleen, I envy you not having to paint your bathrooms. My bathroom is paneled and had an attempt at a chair rail molding thing. Makes painting even more of a pain in the butt than it would be otherwise. However, the color it was before was just horrible so the paint is necessary. :]
Right now, I think the only blog post my bathroom would inspire would be “Why You Should Finish Redecorating Projects”. LOL
Hi Rachel W, we all have our issues with finishing certain tasks. It seems we now all know yours. My weakness is usually have more than one craft project underway at the same time. right now there is one sitting on my kitchen bench awaiting my return. There are a couple of others finding in the spare room closet as well. And then there are all the Pinterest “must try” project I haven’t even got around to yet. Luckily they are all small, unlike your bathroom. Mind you my kitchen took about three months to finally complete but that was no fault of my own. The cabinet maker was a little hard to pin down.
The bathroom was the very first room I got in shape when I started decluttering and it got even better since! There are no decorative items in my bathroom and I have relatively minimal cosmetic products – though these are a constant use-it-up-challenge here, as I do get such things as presents. However, it’s all within reason, e.g. at the moment I have two extra shower gels and two extra bars of soap – an amount that will be used up before I receive the next presents, I think! 😉
I could probably do with fewer towels, but it’s not excessive either, I got rid of the excess some time ago. I will ask my boyfriend whether he is ready to get rid of one of his worn towels (his two “specials” are definitely older and more worn than the rest), but it’s also fine if he wants to keep them. I did get rid of some bathroom items this weekend though: I used up the rests of two lotions and a shampoo and decluttered a hairbrush, a blush brush I never used and two hair clips.
Hi Sanna, well done. My bathroom was also an area worked through very early on. Even earlier than my 365 days. You reminded me that I had meant to include brushes in the mini mission. Oh well, that can be one for another day.
Haha! I think I won’t be able to join then! – No wait, I still have a couple of paint brushes I probably don’t need that urgently (though not in the bathroom…).
I agree with Andreia, it is an area that needs constant supervision. I have noticed a couple of times recently that both vanities need a tidy. I had put aside towels which had holes or frayed edges to be used for rags or ??? but unfortunately they got mixed back in with the good ones after a mop up emergency.
Hi Moni, I have more towels than we really need, with six pair between the two of us and 2 beach towels. Even when we have visitors it is more than enough. However they are all still in very good shape and don’t take up much space so I will keep them. I dare say they will last at least another ten years. One pair are already more than twenty years old and still going strong. However, I will ask my husband if there are any towels he doesn’t like among them. If so I may purge those to the thrift shop.
Hi Moni! About towels, I don’t have them in the bathroom either, because I live in a very cold and humid town and if I store towels in the bathroom they will become moldy. So I have a cupboard and a drawer of hand towels and a drawer of bath towels. I have recently turned some old towels into cleaning rags (I actually don’t cut them, just put them in the laundry room and start using them for floor and other surfaces cleaning). As I use my towels until they look very shabby I think it is very rude to donate them to someone else (no animal shelters that I know of around here). So just move the shabby ones somewhere else and keep the better ones for your use.
Moni and Andréia, I don’t store my towels in the bathroom either but they are used in there which is why that were a part of this weeks missions. I did in the last house I lived in though. The master bathroom in that house was huge though.
Andreia – we have ‘hot water cupboards’ in NZ which is a cylinder that holds and heats water for the household, our cylinder is around 6 foot tall and prob 2.5 feet across. The hot water cylinder (which it never occured to me till now what a weird name it is) is usually located in a cupboard with shelves for towells and linen. As some heat comes off the hot water cylinder its also a good spot for laundry thats been dried in cold weather and needs a bit of finishing off in warmer air. I always assumed all countries had the same thing but my first trip to Australia I wandered around the house and couldnt find one. I guess they dont need the extra heat inside!
Colleen – usually I think we have too many towels but but as the washing machine has been disconnected during painting and it’s been handy having them! As the first lot have started to come apart we’ll just use them up and reward ourselves with some nice Egyptian ones when the kids leave home.
Good point Moni. I just figure that on those rare occasions I would just duck down to the laundromat a couple of blocks away. Having travelled a lot I am very accustomed to using laundromats.
This is such a good idea because the bathroom seems to be one of those places that collects stuff. I keep the top of the vanity clean but I have to be really careful with the inside stuff. Having to have all the plumbing redone was a great things because it forced Mom to take everything out of her vanity. She decluttered some things because of that. Now to get into the second closet in her bath. It needs a good clean out.
Another case of a probortunity Deb. Your plumbing problems forcing the opportunity to declutter some stuff out of those bathroom cupboards. It’s always best to look on the bright side of these things.
Yep, I love these kinds of opportunities. Grin.
Oh! The Dreaded Bathroom! Ours is pretty good. The water leaves a pretty tough residue and I need to recaulk the tub too! Drat! Medicines are not too bad – we keep the most used in a cupboard by the kitchen sink for easy access. I don’t have a lot of makeup and just last week, I cut my hair shorter – a lot. I also changed the color. The whispy blond wasn’t working any longer. I’m trying to make my morning routine easier. It wasn’t really bad to begin with, but anything helps, eh?
Hi Michelle, I hope the new haircut works for you and makes your morning routine simpler. There is nothing better than a simple morning routine when you have to be places.
Hi Colleen! I looked up on the internet and found this link for medicine storage:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/007189.htm
Thanks Andréia, I’ll check it out. Although in our apartment our medicines are stored in the guest bathroom which is very rarely used aside from the toilet.
I recently went through all my skin care/makeup products. There were several things that I was able to pass along to a teenage friend who likes to try different things, nothing like mascara or anything with bacteria concerns.
You brought up a great point about makeup brushes, Colleen. They come with lots of products or they come in multiples when you only want one. I only use 2 out of the 6 or so that I have. Those can go away!
Hi Vicki K, I repurposed an old mineral makeup brush into a brush for cleaning up glitter from craft projects. It works a treat. I just cleaned it a little first.
I also kept one for spring cleaning (dusting). It’s great to clean small gaps (sorry, I don’t come up with the right vocabulary here probably). I use it for dusting e.g. my sewing machine or a couple of ornaments and it’s the best tool for these purposes I’ve had so far.
Bathroom clutter is another trouble spot for me. I used to coupon more regularly than I do now and thus I have excess of lots of items (shampoos, razors and blades, etc) that will last me for years. Though I now know I don’t need to and shouldn’t buy in such bulk, I still think I’m going to keep most of them and do a Use it Up rather than decluttering them. I’m also trying to get out of debt, so it’d be silly to donate/get rid of these items and have to turn around and buy more in my strict budget.
That makes perfect sense to me Kayla.