Organizing The Pet Station In 5 Easy Steps

As I stood, clutching the day’s first cup of coffee, I stared at the mayhem on my kitchen counter. Moments earlier, while preparing the dog meals for the morning, my bumbling fingers knocked a half-dozen pill bottles off the counter and onto the floor. It happened yesterday, too. Fed up, I declared, out loud, to myself: “I’m organizing the pet station” TODAY!

Otis is my only dog, but two other dogs are in foster care with me. With each animal comes more stuff! In truth, when foster dogs are adopted, all of their stuff doesn’t go, like the leftover pain medication for spay/neuter surgery or ear ointment or eye drops. We keep those items on the off-chance another foster will arrive and need said product. (and they don’t) Without discipline and regular editing of supplies, things sit around, taking up space and blowing past their “use by” date. Guilty!

How does your pet station look this morning? Honestly, when is the last time you moved everything to one side and, bottle by bottle, item by item, you looked at everything? It’s been a year or more since I’ve done it, and I found some uh-ohs.

Before… what a disorganized mess!

Here’s a photo of my pet station before I began organizing it:

my pet station and supplies are a disorganized mess

Organizing The Pet Station Begins With A Plan…

First, before I could organize anything, I needed to make a plan. Obviously, no plan is what created this mess in the first place!

I needed to think about how I use this small corner of my kitchen and what would make my tasks (and life!) easier.

I use this corner for preparing meals and for dispensing regular and PRN/as-needed medications. Additionally, I’ve grown into the habit of leaving my training supplies and husbandry supplies laying out because, well, there is no dedicated place to store them.

The more I thought through how I’d like for this corner to function, the more I knew that a trip to the store was the first step.

….And The Perfect Tool For Organizing Pet Supplies

The plan: use a collection of trays to organize my supplies. I headed to Target, because this store carries several different options for organization! The shelves were full of so many different options for organizing spaces.

Most of the selections were deep (tall) bins in various materials – wood, metal, plastic, fabric, natural woven, even a few clear acrylic items. I didn’t need tall. I needed low, open, something impervious, fairly durable, and easy to clean.

Trays! I needed trays.

I found trays for $1.79 each, and excitedly bought 3, one for each dog. Another, bigger size that matched the individual trays ended up in my buggy, too. I forget what I paid for that one. I had a hunch it would be needed.

These trays were not fancy! Made of plastic, a funky mint color, and with a basket pattern, but the best part? These babies could be put in the dishwasher! I couldn’t say the same thing for that fancy, high-priced woven hemp one.

I’ll show you what they looked like in a bit.

Before You Can Organize Your Pet Station, You Have To Make A Mess.

Step 1, move everything out of your pet station area and into a center pile.

You are going to make a mess before you make it neat.

Step 2, create space for three piles: Toss, Store, Keep

You’ll put items into the TOSS pile that you no longer need or can use. All expired medication or expired product goes into this pile!
In the STORE pile, you’ll put things that you pulled out of your supplies and never put back. I’m forever putting the cone-of-shame back into storage or the found sweater that should have been put away back in the spring.
In the KEEP pile, you are items that you use daily, weekly, or (maybe) monthly. You can also include all of your dog’s medications that are not expired and that you may need. *Note* Always talk to your veterinarian before giving a dog medication that is not currently prescribed for them. Like human medication, dog medication is considered non-transferable unless OK’d by a doctor.

Step 3, pick up each item and look at it! Decide in which pile each item will go. Ask: Is this expired? If not, do you use it on a regular basis? Or, is it something that you need immediate access to? Can it be stored somewhere else?

Be decisive! If you don’t/can’t/won’t use it, put it in the toss pile. There was a lot in my toss pile! I had a lot of expired product!

What do you do with all of the medication that is expired or that you no longer use? I’ll tell you more in a bit, but for now, DON’T PUT EXPIRED MEDICATION IN THE TRASH AND DON’T FLUSH IT DOWN THE TOILET!

Look at all of the expired medication taking up space on my kitchen counter! Even my hydrogen peroxide (not included in pic) was expired! And from personal experience, let me tell you, if you need to quickly induce vomiting in your dog because they ate a bunch of grapes, expired peroxide does not work.

As I expected, there were a few duplicates. I found two bottles of Pepsid and two bottles of Zymox. The duplicates of those products belong in the travel bag, not on the kitchen counter. Ah ha! I did find something to put in the STORE pile.

My TOSS pile

Step 4: I sorted what was left into four different piles: Otis, Sassy, Carter, and Community.

Using my three $1.79 trays, I put each dog’s supplies in their own tray. Poor Carter’s tray looks sparse because he’s not here at the moment! Sassy has the most stuff because she’s a princess, you know.

Their trays now look like this:

Can you guess which tray belongs to the Diva of the house?

Step 5, I spent a moment thinking about how to organize the community supplies. Community supplies are products used daily and weekly for husbandry care, training, as well as immediate first-aid supplies.

I wanted to be able to grab and go with the first aid supplies so I used the bigger, matching tray. But I still had stuff loose on the counter, and I didn’t like that.

A tray purchased for a design project wasn’t used and it was sitting around, unloved. It’s leather, which is not a material I’d choose for use in a pet station, but it was here so I decided it would be perfect for the task.

Here’s a photo of my first attempt at organizing the trays:

Too cluttered and crowded. I didn’t like this at all! A goal of organizing the pet station included some aesthetics!

I moved the individual dog trays to the side and out of the way for the moment.

I created a community tray to organize those supplies shared by all dogs.

This was feeling better: I put the first aid supples in the green tray and put that tray in the bigger tray. There is still lots of room left!

Layering in the community items…

Below is the finished community tray.

Here is the final result! A neat and functional and organized pet station.

Using space wisely when organizing the pet station

If I fostered more pets at the same time or used more supples than this, I would also capture the shelving space below – there’s definitely room for improvement on how I utilize those shelves! Ah, one organization project at a time. Maybe one day the individual baskets can go on the top shelf leaving even more of my kitchen counters clean and clear! Goals…….

I wish there was space available to move the dog food bin closer. A while back, I tried to store smaller amounts of dog food in a canister on the kitchen counter, but it attracted bugs. 25 years ago, I was not thinking about pets when I designed this kitchen!

How to get started organizing your pet station? START!

Are you inspired to get busy organizing your pet station? This whole process, minus the time spent shopping, was less than half an hour.

Two words about disposing of pet medication – DON’T FLUSH!

So what am I to do with all of the expired medication I’ve culled from my supplies?

The American Veterinary Medical Association says, “Do not take unwanted or unused medication to your veterinarian unless he or she has state or federal authorization to collect pharmaceuticals for disposal.” They also say flushing meds down the toilet or putting them in the trash is a bad idea: these chemical compounds truly do end up in our water supply. That’s not good!

I followed a link they listed in their article and it took me to a site where I can plug in my zip code and get a list of area locations that participate in drug disposal. Thankfully,13 locations near me participate in this program! How exciting! I’ll investigate these and report back. Luckily, I only have expired antibiotics and NSAID pain medications to dispose of.

Check out the AVMA’s full article on Drug Disposal

Your veterinarian may be a resource for you – they hear this question all.the.time. They can tell you where to go, what to do, who to call.

I’m Thrilled With The Way My Pet Station Project Turned Out

I love my new pet station set up. Organizing the space was a really good decision that didn’t cost much money (less than $10!) and took me about a half an hour.

Now, medication time is faster, meal time is faster, and I’ve quit knocking pill bottles into the dog water bowl. Now that I type that, maybe the water bowl is in the wrong spot. I need to think about my next organizing project!

How about you? How organized is your pet station? Better question, how do you keep it organized? I may need some help in that!

Need more organizing help? Read how I keep the foster dog paperwork organized!