By Trinia Oliver
E&L Assistant Editor

The bathroom cabinet can be one of the most cluttered parts of the house—along with the bedroom closet, the food pantry, and the drawer underneath the oven. The clutter can worsen when living on your own.
But whether you’re in a dorm and sharing the space with roommates or on your own, there are tricks to reduce and clutter and add organization throughout the bathroom almost like magic.
Usually stored in the cabinet beneath the sink are spray bottles of cleaning solution, sponges, towels, or backup supplies of soaps, adhesive bandage, and toothpaste.
An easy way to create space is by using a small extension rod inside the cabinet to hang spray bottles.
If you need more room or if things are still quite messy, buying small plastic storage bins or storage baskets will help quite a lot.
These storage organizers can be organized by products—one for folded washcloths, one for hair products, one for body products, a small one for menstrual supplies, one for cleaning tools and so on.
The bins, baskets, and extension rod can all be bought in stores such as Target, Walmart and Office Depot.
If there are drawers in the bathroom, applying this same technique of using small baskets is useful for easy organizing small things such as bows, headbands, combs and brushes.
If nail polish has taken up a lot of space, purchasing a short wire basket to mount on the wall will give them a home.
For those who desire Do It Yourself projects that are more hands-on, here are instructions to make a three-tier tray for jewelry and a magnetic makeup board that is both easy and inexpensive.
For the three-tier jewelry tray, all the supplies can be purchased at Walmart or Dollar General: three crystal candle stick holders, super glue, a sponge brush and three circular plates that are painted the color of your choice. Either metal plates or even “shatterproof” dishware work well.
The three-tier tray is assembled by super gluing the crystal stick holders to the centers of the dishes, stacking one on top of the other.
Using the sponge brush makes the super glue easy to spread across the surfaces of the stick holders to the plates. This tier tray can be set on a shelf or on the bathroom counter.
The magnetic makeup board requires a few more materials: magnets and a hot glue gun to secure them, or sticker-based magnets, a metal sheet or a magnetic dry erase board.
The easiest step is putting the magnets on the backs of all the makeup products you wish to hang on the board.
If using a hot glue gun is not an option (which would be used to glue the magnets to the makeup), using sticker-based magnets will substitute just fine.
The next step is to assemble your new makeup board—depending on how strong the magnetism is, hot gluing two metal boards together may have to be done.
Finalize the project by painting the board in a color of your choosing, and supergluing a nice picture frame to the front to give it flair.
If painting isn’t desired, another option is using patterned fabric cut to the size of the magnetic board and applied with adhesive glue.
The magnetized makeup should work through the fabric. The metal boards can be found at Home Depot or Lowe’s; the magnetic dry erase boards may be the more expensive option.