Organize Medicine Bottles (she: Anna)

I am married to a wonderful man and have a beautiful 2 year old daughter. Our lives, just like everyone’s, are crazy busy, but in the midst of that I love to clean, I love to organize, I love to decorate. I also love to help others do the same. For years people have asked me questions about cleaning, meal planning and other household things. I decided to start compiling these questions and blogging about them to help out as many people as possible.

I love the feeling that a clean, organized and beautiful home brings. My desire is that everyone can experience this feeling. Cleaning, organizing and decorating don’t have to be hard and they don’t have to be “chores”. My wish with Ask Anna is to teach you the tools to make these things easier so that you can spend more time enjoying your family and be proud of the space you live in.

How to Organize Medicine Bottles

Question:

Please help! I have two large shoes boxes overflowing with medicines. I’m sure a few of them have expired, but most are here to stay. The bottles are 85 different sizes. We’ve got supplements, vitamins, and OTC meds for every occasion. And, don’t get me started on the pet medicines. I know this problem is going to spiral out of control when we start having kids. Do you have a good way to sort & store these?

Answer:

This is an area that I have always struggled with organizing. I seriously think that medicine companies should be required to all have the same size & shape bottles. It is so hard to organize them when, like you said, they “are 85 different sizes”!

When we moved a year ago I bought this sliding storage container and organized all of our medicines. Over the year though we have started purchasing different pain meds for Malea (now that she’s a toddler and no longer an infant), my husband broke his face last year so that required more meds, I’ve had like 6 sinus infections this year so I’ve bought stuff to try to help me with that, etc., the list goes on… So basically this sliding storage container is no longer big enough for all of our stuff and, as you can see, it is FAR from organized!

While I was doing some shopping at Target I came across these great storage boxes. I bought 4 of them, one for each category of medicine: Malea’s Meds, Pain Meds, Cold & Sinus, Ice Packs & Wraps. I store our vitamins in the kitchen so that we remember to take them everyday but if you have vitamins and pet meds that need to be stored, you will need to buy a few more containers.

Here’s my little helper. This is her saying “cheese.”

Step 1: Categorize all of your medications. Like I mentioned above categorize them into groups: Pain Meds, Cold & Sinus, Ice Packs & Wraps, etc.

Step 2: Make sure to check the expiration date on each item in the medicine box. You don’t want to use anything that has expired. I was SHOCKED to find that some of the meds I had just bought in the last year were already expired!

Here’s Malea helping me check dates.

This was by far the worst expiration date I found. Can’t believe I didn’t catch it before now! It only expired 9 years ago!!!

This is my stash of expired meds, WAY bigger then I thought it would be.

This pile also contains all of the bulky boxes that were in my medicine box before. All boxes do is take up unnecessary space. Take things out of the boxes and you’ll be surprised how much easier they fit!

Step 3: Properly label each box.

Bust out the label maker, or if you don’t have one, a permanent marker. When you’re not feeling well and you need some medicine you are not going to want to have to guess which box is the one you need, and you definitely don’t want to be taking any of your pets meds! So take a couple of minutes and properly label each box.

Here’s what mine look like:

I also bought this small set of plastic drawers for all of our little random things. I always have such a hard time getting band aids out of the box so–I know it doesn’t sound organized–but when I buy a box of band aids I dump it in the band aid drawer and it makes them much easier to access when I need one. I also have a drawer for neosporin, poison oak cream, etc. Ointments are too small for a whole box so I gave them their own drawer instead.

The only things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes were the alcohol and hydrogen peroxide. I have plenty of room in my linen closet (where I keep all of our meds) so I just placed them next to everything else.

I am very happy with the transformation and I think it will be SO MUCH easier to keep these boxes organized.

Do you have any great tips for keeping your medicines organized? I’d love to hear your ideas.

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Mariel

Owner & Author at Or so she says...

Mariel (mahr-eeee-elle) is a mother to six, wife to one. Loves homeschooling, golfing, cupcakes, traveling, cuddling, non-fiction books, gardening, James Taylor, family time, and a sexy wedge. This is her blog. Enjoy!