A Cleaning-Supply Storage Guide
While cleaning may not be your favorite activity, it’s an important part of maintaining your home and keeping you and your loved ones healthy. To make your life a little easier, consider how you can better organize your cleaning supplies. Having everything stored properly in easy-to-reach spaces can help make cleaning your home less of a hassle and give you the motivation to consistently get it done.
Make safety a top priority
It’s essential that you store all cleaning solutions and disinfectants out of reach of young children and pets. Utilize the higher shelves in your home, and be sure to add a child-safety lock to any cabinet or closet that houses toxic products. Because of the chemicals in them, each item might have different requirements, so read each label to make sure you’re storing them correctly. For instance, most cleaners need to be kept at room temperature, and some contain potentially flammable ingredients, meaning they should be kept away from heat sources. And if you’re concerned about the toxicity of ingredients, consider switching to all-natural products or making them yourself. Some homemade cleaners are relatively simple to create—for example, you can create your own glass cleaner with one cup each of isopropyl alcohol, white vinegar, and water and fifteen to twenty drops of any essential oil.
Get smart with storage solutions
As long as it’s safe to do so, it’s a good idea to have most of your items stored together so you don’t have to search high and low and in every cabinet for a specific cleaner. An empty storage closet or extra space in your laundry room is perfect for this.
If you don’t have a lot of room, though, the backs of your doors can be great spots for storing supplies. You can better organize your items by using adhesive or over-the-door hooks on your kitchen cabinets, pantry door, or laundry room door. You can also add more usable space to a cabinet by purchasing a multitiered shelf, which will give you different levels to stack your supplies. And if you have absolutely no available space in your cabinets, closets, or laundry room, you can create your own supply closet by purchasing clear, airtight containers that you can fill and place anywhere in your home. (Just make sure they’re out of reach of pets and young children.)
As for larger supplies such as brooms, mops, and vacuums, find a place that is out of the way but easily accessible. Consider using hooks to hang light objects on a pantry or garage wall or in the same area as the rest of your supplies. This can help keep your bulkier supplies from taking up too much floor space and becoming a hindrance when you’re trying to get to the rest of your things.
Clearly label your products
While most store-bought supplies have bright labels listing their specific purposes and ingredients, many people like to make their own cleaners or transfer store-bought solutions to more aesthetically pleasing containers. For safety purposes, always make sure to add an identifying label when you do this. Consider purchasing a label maker for a simple way to print the item’s name and ingredients, taking care to create a new label any time you change what’s in the container. This will help ensure that you and anyone else in your household don’t accidentally ingest a chemical mixture, use a bleaching product on the living room rug, or sanitize the kitchen counters with a bathroom cleaner.
Organize by frequency of use
To make your job as hassle-free as possible, organize your items according to how often you use them. After you’ve picked a space to store your supplies, move your most frequently used items to the front and your rarely used items toward the back. If you find there are certain cleaning supplies you tend to use together, you can purchase a caddy to keep them in and carry with you while sprucing up the house. Include a sponge, scrub brush, gloves, multipurpose cleaner, and anything else you find yourself constantly reaching for.
Organizing your supplies can help make cleaning just a little easier for you and your household, so take the time to find a place for everything—and try to keep everything in its place.