The frozen custard chain Sheridan’s began around this area and Kyle has been doing some work in Overland Park where he discovered Unforked, their new local/fresh/organic restaurant experiment. He’s super fond of the restaurant and last week he discovered this really cool suspended toilet paper holder. Because he’s a great husband, he snapped a couple pictures of it with his iPad to share with me and now I get to share them with you!

It really seems to fit with the decor of the bathroom and it’s an easy enough project that moves your toilet paper rolls a little closer to the toilet. It would actually work perfectly in our bathroom where there really isn’t a convenient spot to attach a toilet paper roll holder to the wall. Those wires suspend all the way up to the ceiling.

I’m not sure that the heavy industrial look is quite what would fit in our bathroom, but I imagine you could cover the suspension wires with something a little prettier for your space.

Definitely an inspiring project to add to the pinboard and try to make a reality during the next Pinterest challenge.

My major focus heading in to vacation was to have a couple overnight trips that would add some excitement to a week I intended to spend organizing my bathroom and kitchen. I’m really happy with how both the kitchen and the bathroom look now that I’m not even sure I needed the trips to make the vacation seem like a total success. Surely, everyone has a better day at work when they know their bathroom and kitchen are in order at home?

Here’s where I started: A mess!

We moved into the house in October of last year and began unpacking into the bathroom closet. We then finished sanding the bathroom, got new floors put in, and used the bathroom closet to hold the dust from both of those projects and our toilet paper still protected by its packaging, of course. As you can see, we didn’t even bother trying. We just hoped that if you opened the closet door, nothing fell out on you.

We didn’t even finish unpacking!

So that was my starting point. Any attempt at putting everything on dust-free shelves in the closet would be an improvement but I wanted something we could stick with so I invested in a bunch of small plastic bins to keep track of everything. Luckily, almost everything was on a really good sale because of dorm move-in season.

I ended up with separate bins for things like shampoo/conditioner, body wash/soap, kyle’s toiletries, my toiletries, travel size things, hair products, medicine, and nail polish. I also had very small bins for bandaids, cotton balls, q-tips, toothpaste/toothbrushes, etc. While I was organizing, I realized that you couldn’t identify the contents of the bins without moving them around so I bought a labelmaker and labelled everything that needed one.

Like I said, I am so happy with how the whole thing turned out. What I’m most surprised by is the amount of space we recovered by organizing everything. A lot of items were able to come out of the medicine cabinet and under the sink and get organized into the closet. Now we have a lot of extra space for things in both of those places and I automatically feel like our bathroom has about 5x the storage space that it did a week ago.

My favorite trick I used when organizing is actually under the vanity. I found a pin on pinterest that recommended using a magazine file to organize blowdryers and curling irons under the sink.

I had to pull this out from under the sink to take the photo where I could get a little bit of natural light — as you can tell, our bathroom is not the ideal place to try to take good quality photographs. This is a metal magazine file that I bought because it was on sale, making it 2 cents cheaper than the next least-expensive file, and I thought that the metal might hold up a little bit better. I have a hair dryer, a regular flat iron, and my ProStyler in there and it keeps the cords out of the way and everything easy to find under the cabinet. I love it when something from Pinterest works really well for me!

Octopus Shower Caddy at Urban Outfitters

This is odd, but that’s probably why I love it. I really don’t like shower caddies because they inevitably turn rusted or gross no matter the material. A $25 solution to my problems. You just slide your little necessities into the loops. It also comes in yellow.

I fell in love with the tile in this shower from Austin-based Thoughtbarn’s Calabria-Road Project featured in Interiors: Thoughtbarn’s Calabria Road Project at 2Modern Blog. But you’re not surprised are you? You know I’m a sucker for blue with grey. It also showcases a lot of the qualities that make me have a weakness for Moroccan patterns in home decor.