Easy Upcycled Bucket for Bathroom Organization

We love everything about our new house, except the hall bath. It’s a little small for a hall bath. And it’s a lot small for 2 teenage girls and a 10-year old boy to share.

In our last house, the linen closet was in the kids’ bath so there was plenty of room to store items, like cotton balls and cotton swabs (unless you have 2 teenage girls, you have no idea how many cotton balls and swabs one family can go through!). The only storage in this bathroom is the small cabinet you see.

After 2 months in this house and endless visitations from my daughters to procure cotton balls and swabs while I’m getting ready in my bathroom, I knew it was time to figure something out.

I’ve seen plenty of cute glass storage containers that folks use for bathroom storage. But with 3 kids in one small space, glass containers did not seem like a good idea.

I’d purchased these buckets at a thrift store about 6 months ago for a project that didn’t work out. They were $.40 each. One day last week I spied them in a cabinet in our laundry room, and bing! I knew I could use these buckets to organize the kids’ bathroom.

The ribbons were a little too blah and froufrou at the same time. I removed them and washed the buckets well, inside and out.

I collected my paper cutter and scraps of vinyl leftover from other projects.

Using the smallest of the scraps, I cut various widths of vinyl long enough to fit vertically on the buckets.

I chose to run the stripes vertically to make it easier for me to keep them straight. (I still can’t figure out if there’s a way to run a horizontal strip around a graduated bucket and have the ends line up). I started by placing stripes on the little slits where the ribbon originally threaded through the bucket. Then I filled stripes in the rest of the way around the bucket.