September is a great month to organize the medicine cabinet. Doing it now ensures that you will have plenty of time to see what you might need and stock up on the essentials before the cold and flu season sets in. Remember that depending on where you live, this season may start as early as the end of this month.
Do you have multiple medicine cabinets? Start with the most frequently used one and go from there, either blitzing through all of them one at a time, or doing one cabinet per day. Just don’t start pulling stuff out of all of them at once! You’ll just wind up with a big discouraging mess that gets shoved back in the cabinets, or worse, left out on counters and floors.
The first thing you will need to do is to empty everything out of the cabinet onto a flat surface. Roughly organize as you go, by grouping like items, such as prescriptions in one area, bandages in another.
Toss out the following items:
- Anything that is missing a label
- Anything you can’t identify
- All of those extra droppers and cups that come with over the counter medicine. Don’t worry, you’ll get new ones when you buy new medicine.
- Any medication that is past its expiration date, whether it is over the counter or prescription. You can check the dates on tubes of medication by looking at the very end of it, where the tube is crimped closed.
- Any “sterile” bandages that have torn wrappers
- Any makeup that is past its prime (especially anything that touches your eyes).
TIP: To prevent children or animals getting into the medication, seal it up in an old jar and double bag it.
Take the opportunity to clean the medicine cabinet and shelves. it is amazing how much gunk can build up in a medicine cabinet.
Next, place your keep items back in your medicine chest, keeping the items grouped as much as possible. Make a note of things you will need for the upcoming season, and add the items to your shopping list.
Sit back and enjoy the fact that your medicine cabinet is organized and safe.
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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