Organizing with Kids – the Bathroom

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Summer is organizing time for me. Homeschooling six kids means LOTS to organize. This summer I signed up for Simplify101’s Organizing with Kids online class. I have absolutely loved the ideas and the inspiration. I thought I would share my projects with you.

The first project I’m going to share is the last room I want to go into: the kids’ upstairs bath. I have FIVE boys and ONE girl using one bathroom. Need I explain more? Aby’s class really helped me evaluate the problems I was having with this room.

You see two of the problems in the above photo: the kids leave towels and swimsuits on the floor. In the past I might have just thought about how MISBEHAVED the kids were and gotten nowhere. The truth is they didn’t have a good place to hang wet swimsuits and towels. One or two people can store these things on the shower railing, but six CANNOT. An additional problem I had with the towels was knowing whose was whose. While I had long ago bought each child a specific color towel, the kids managed to mess up that system by arguing that their color was the turquoise blue and not the deep blue. They had also begun ignoring the color system completely. Most of the towels were very worn, so I was ready to make a change.

I decided I wanted to get the kids personalized towels to solve the problem. I also wanted each child to have a place to hang wet swimsuits. This is what I came up with:

I can’t even explain how giddy I am over this. I ordered the towels from PotteryBarn Teen. I was set to get even cuter towels from PotteryBarn kids, but I wanted bigger towels, especially now that I have TWO teens in the house. These towels are so luxurious! The hooks I bought from Home Depot. A smaller hook holds the kids’ swimsuits underneath the towel. The kids do leave their clothes in the bathroom after showering, too, but I do not want a clothes hamper in here holding a mix of things. Instead, I will be checking the bathroom daily and making the offenders return their dirty clothing to their respective hampers.

Problem #2 was a jumble of toiletries. I had attempted to solve the problem with labeled plastic drawers. These were ignored and no one had any idea whose toothbrush, toothpaste, and hair brush was whose. A collosal mess was made in the two drawers under the sink.

I figured the answer had to have something to do with the closet, whose space was being poorly used.

This was my answer. I bought mesh toiletry bags for each kid from Amazon for under $5 each. I also bought second towels in turquoise with the kids’ names embroidered in white to use alternate weeks.

I quickly grabbed scrapbooking supplies to label each kid’s bag. The kids did the rest using my LetraTag label maker. Not only are the bags labeled, but everything inside is, too.

One of the important aspects of this class is that the kids be involved. I was thrilled that my daughter wanted to clean the sink. I should have asked her to pay me to do it, Huckleberry Finn style. 🙂

Here’s the sink after. I have since purchased bathroom cups and a SpongeBob soap dispenser. I leave the dental rinse and cleaning wipes out so they will be used, even though it doesn’t look as neat.

So that’s my bathroom organizing project with the kids. I look forward to showing you the other projects soon!