It’s time to get down and dirty and start some necessary scrubbing about the house. You head to your closet only to find that the shelves are stockpiled full of cleaners and that getting to the one you need is going to mean digging through the pile to find it.

You don’t know what half the cleaners are on the shelf and how old they may be either. Things have started to get out of hand and you know that you need to get some organization into your cleaning closet before you run out of room to store any new cleaners that you may vitally need.

Getting things organized

In order to get your cleaners organized the first thing you do have to do is find out what you actually have. This means emptying the shelves from top to bottom by pulling out all the cleaners and putting them on the floor. You’ll be surprised to see just how many bottles you have accumulated and will wonder how they ever fit into your closet in the first place.

Now you’ll need to organize these cleaners into separate categories so that you can get a clear mental inventory of what you’re dealing with.

Here’s a sample organizational list that you can use to get started.

• Kitchen cleaners
• Bathroom cleaners
• Floor cleaners
• Glass cleaners
• Upholstery cleaners
• Dusting spray and furniture polish
• Miscellaneous cleaners

Put the cleaners that you have on the floor into piles according to the categories that they fit into. At this point you’ll probably see that you have some doubles of cleaning supplies. You may also find some empty bottles and some cleaners that you haven’t used in years that can be tossed away.

What you’ll be trying find are any other cleaning products that could possibly get thrown out. Carefully select the cleaners that you regularly use from the ones that you probably really won’t ever use again. Perhaps you have changed the type of cleaning product that you use for the floors, for example, yet still have some of the old kinds of floors cleaners still hanging around. These types of things can get tossed in order to free up space in your closet.

Restocking the shelves

Now that you have thrown out some of your cleaners it’s time to put them back in the closet but not in the same haphazard fashion that you used to have them before. Head over to a dollar store and pick up some small baskets that you can use to keep your cleaning supply closet organized.

Put the cleaners into the separate baskets according to the category they belong to and label these new baskets accordingly. When everything is put back onto the shelves you’ll be able to see and grab the cleaner you need without having to dig through a mess of bottles.

At times it can be very difficult to have to confront housecleaning and one of the things that may be holding you back is your disorganized mess of cleaners. Once you get all of your cleaners into order it will be time to move onto your cleaning supplies to get them organized as well.

Follow the same procedure as above so that you don’t have any problem finding everything you need. You’ll see that housecleaning becomes much less of a chore when all of the tools you need have been neatly organized and compacted into one area.