Where Do You Keep Cleaning Supplies?

Where do you keep cleaning supplies… other than under the sink? Sharing the different spaces we safely keep our cleaning chemicals and supplies in our home with small children.

Over the years I’ve shared organization tips and videos and in those posts, I’ve shared what we keep under our kitchen sink. And spoiler, it’s just kitchen things. One of the questions I’ve had a few times on those posts is where we keep our cleaning supplies.

I know this isn’t a very exciting topic, but it’s one that I know I had a hard time answering when we first had young kids and wanted to keep cleaners out of their reach, and judging by the comments and DMs I get… some of you are struggling with it to!

So today I’m sharing exactly where we keep our cleaning supplies in our home to keep them pretty safe from young children but to also make things easier for us to clean AND to help us make the most of the storage spaces we have (under the sink is precious space in the kitchen and bathroom!).

In this post I want to give you some ideas on how to maybe do things differently. I don’t want to give you a list of expensive organizational things to buy. Because I’m sure we all have a long enough list of things to buy!

Organizing under the kitchen sink- and tips for the whole kitchen!

My best tip for cleaning supply organization

My best tip for pretty much every kind of organization is… Keep things where you use them. This was a key idea in the Design Mom Book. I read this a few years back and it changed the way we organize our home in so many ways. So much so that it’s the biggest tip I give in my best home organization tips blog post.

I know, I know. It sounds obvious, but there is so many ideas we have about how to organize a home that have been passed down to us. If we don’t take the time to evaluate whether those work for us in our home with our lifestyle, we won’t change.

For me, one of those things was to keep cleaners under my kitchen sink. Growing up, this is where we kept all cleaning supplies. And when I’ve helped friends move… guess what’s under most of their sinks? Cleaning supplies! And I’m not just talking about dish soap.

Cleaning Supplies in the Kitchen

I do keep some cleaning supplies in the kitchen. The ones I use daily in my kitchen stay there. I’m talking about dish soap, countertop spray, paper towel, a magic eraser and dishwasher soap. I keep these under my sink so they’re easy to grab and use, but the heavier duty cleaners, I keep out of reach.

I help to contain spills from cleaning supplies by keeping these in a clear basket, if they spill or drip, I just wash the basket- not the whole cupboard.

If you have small children or toddlers, you could opt to lock your kitchen under-the-sink cabinets. I’m not concerned about my kids any longer with dish soap and countertop spray being the key cleaners under there. We did lock this cupboard in our last home when all four of our kids were under 4.

We also have dishwasher pods though and I’ve opted to keep those in a screw top container. Tiny hands can’t open this jar without help, my five year old is still needing my help opening it. As our kids grow, they’re helping and putting on the dishwasher is something they do for their responsibilities so the older kids can open this just fine.

By keeping only a handful of cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, I open up valuable kitchen cabinet space for taller items.

I shared this in a kitchen organization tips post, but I keep large countertop appliances under the kitchen sink. That used to be my InstantPot but now it’s my Airfryer. I love these appliances, but they’re so tall- adjusting the shelves in another cupboard would mean losing valuable shelf space. Instead, I just pop them under the sink where there’s plenty of height available. It works really well for us.

Where to keep kitchen cleaners you don’t use daily

Alright, so if you are only keeping those cleaners you use daily under the sink… where do the rest go? For us, we have a cleaning cupboard built into our kitchen, but I know not everyone will have that. In our last home, we turned a hallway closet into a half cleaning cupboard, half pantry. Wherever you keep your broom right now, the top shelf of that closet or cupboard would be a great place for these items.

We have our vacuum mounted in the bottom half of this cupboard along with our broom and dustpan and our mop. On the top shelf, we have kitchen cleaning supplies that aren’t used daily. Again, keeping these in a plastic basket (solid bottom) keeps spills and drips contained and easy to clean.

I also love how easy it is for me to reach cleaners at the very back of the cupboard. I just pull the basket out and have access to even the back corner, no more standing on a chair to reach the back corner. It’s a small thing, but for me it’s made all the difference. We keep our stainless steel cleaner, oven cleaner, glass spray and more in here.

Where to keep bathroom cleaning supplies

The bathroom cabinet is a high demand space! We are a family of 6, so the amount of bathroom items is… well… enough to fill a bathroom cabinet without making room for toilet cleaner and shower sprays. While my best tip for cleaning supplies is to keep them when they are used that’s not always possible. For our main floor bathrooms, we keep our cleaning supplies up high (again, with smaller kids this just makes me feel more comfortable). We keep them in a caddy on the top shelf of our hallway closet.

plastic caddy full of bathroom cleaning supplies on bathroom floor

This works so well for us, it’s easy to grab down for whoever is cleaning the bathroom- whether it’s me or in the summer the kids, it’s easy to carry to the bathroom (about four steps from the closet) and again, contains any spills or drips to make clean up easy. In that caddy we keep some rubber gloves and all of our bathroom cleaners.

If you have bathrooms on more than one floor in your house, I’d definitely suggest keeping cleaners on each floor if possible.

DIY Rustic wood vanity for a small bathroom

We have one basement bathroom that’s in my son’s bedroom. It’s very small and doesn’t have much storage. Instead of giving him allll the cleaners, we have give him trash bags to replace his trash can and a container of antibacterial wipes for wiping things down. They’re stored in the basket under his sink. This is age appropriate for him to be able to maintain his bathroom every other week (we have a cleaner come every other week to clean bathrooms and floors, so it never gets tooo bad with this system).

Where to keep other cleaners

So what about cleaning supplies that are not bathroom or kitchen cleaners? Here’s where we keep the rest!

We keep the spin mop bucket and our handheld carpet cleaner on the floor in our hallway closet. These are bulky items and this is such a convenient place for us to tuck them in there.

But my hallway closet is SO FULL!

This is only possible for us to take the space for cleaning supplies out of this closet because we keep other things where they’re used as well. We keep extra bedding in the rooms it’s used in (top shelf of the kids closets are often unused!). We keep beach towels in our laundry room (the kids can easily grab them when they go out the basement door into the backyard to play in water). We keep kitchen towels and cloths in kitchen drawers as well.

We also have a cleaning caddy for vehicle cleaners. We keep this in the garage and it carries any cleaners we use to clean the vehicles with.

Extra heavy duty cleaners and bulk size refills are all kept in our laundry room. We tend to buy things at Costco and keeping a shelf that’s near the top of a cabinet helps keep them easy for us to grab but out of reach of little ones.

I hope this has been helpful and gotten you thinking about how you can make the most of your cabinet and closet space where you keep your cleaning supplies. I know it’s not the most *exciting* topic but rethinking where we keep our cleaning supplies… and everything, really has made a big difference in how well we are able to use all of our storage space We’ve been doing this for a quite few years now and it’s so much more practical than keeping all of the cleaners in one spot.