In a small bathroom, every bit of found storage space is a gift. And one of the best gifts I ever bought myself to maximize the confines of my undersize bathroom is a magnetic knife rack from IKEA.
No, I don’t keep cutlery in my bathroom. Instead, I’ve corralled any and all beauty accessories made of metal—tweezers, cuticle trimmers, nail clippers, nail scissors, bobby pins, styling clips, and the like—onto an IKEA Hultarp Magnetic Knife Rack, which I’ve stuck to the inside of my medicine cabinet’s mirrored, metal door.
The rack keeps all of those little necessities securely in place and allows me to grab what I want without having to rummage around, and without inadvertently knocking other stuff off the cabinet’s shelves. And of course, it also frees up precious space on those shelves, as well as in the drawers under my sink, for other essentials.
It’s a tiny hack that, I’m proud to say, several of my Wirecutter colleagues have told me is “genius.”
This handsome strip can hold dozens of little metal accessories and easily fits inside most medicine cabinets, but we’ve found that it might not support a lot of weight.
I accidentally discovered this organizing trick when I was relocating from Montreal to New Jersey eight years ago. I was at that loopy-brained phase of packing where I was just dumping untold numbers of unrelated bits and bobs into the same box and calling it a day. A stash of bobby pins that had been living helter-skelter in a vanity drawer ended up in the same box as my refrigerator magnets, and when the former became stuck to the latter, I realized that I should find a way to use magnets to keep the pins organized in my new bathroom.
Originally, my plan was to repurpose a fridge magnet or two in a bathroom drawer so that my bobby pins would stay grouped together instead of scattered about. But as I unpacked my random-things boxes in New Jersey, I found plenty more items that I could organize this way—I would just need something bigger than a kitchen magnet or two to make it happen.
Soon after, I was scrolling Facebook Marketplace (as one is wont to do when trying to furnish a new place) and spotted an IKEA Hultarp magnetic rack in good used condition for all of $5. Voilà.
Of course, you absolutely do not need to use a Hultarp magnetic rack specifically for this hack. Most any magnetic strip or rack will do—including one of our storage picks, the affordable Modern Innovations Stainless Steel Magnetic Knife Bar—so long as it fits your space and your needs.
Best for…
Although this strip is intended for holding tools such as measuring spoons and kitchen scissors, it works for corralling metal bathroom items as well.
At 15 inches across, the Hultarp magnetic rack easily fits inside my medicine cabinet. (According to Lowe’s, medicine cabinets typically measure between 15 and 36 inches wide.) The rack also holds an impressive amount of stuff: two pairs of tweezers, two nail clippers, two pairs of cuticle scissors, four pairs of hair scissors (in my family, we started cutting our own hair during the pandemic), a measuring spoon (for meting out cough syrup), and a couple dozen bobby pins.
Because my medicine cabinet has a metal door, the Hultarp magnetic rack sticks to it without tools or installation (and any other would do the same). Should you need to mount the Hultarp magnetic rack to a non-metal surface, note that IKEA doesn’t sell it with mounting hardware, so you must acquire or purchase that separately. In contrast, the Modern Innovations rack mentioned above is sold with mounting hardware included.
For renters or those who aren’t comfortable screwing or drilling holes into a wall or cabinet door, I asked our home-improvement team for a workaround. Senior staff writers Tim Heffernan and Doug Mahoney both suggested 3M Command Picture Hanging Strips, which we also recommend for babyproofing doors and drawers because they’re easier to remove from painted or tiled surfaces without causing damage—especially in comparison with something more heavy-duty, like construction adhesive, which Tim called “a potentially tempting but bad idea.”
The Hultarp magnetic rack comes only in matte black, which happens to match the interior of my medicine cabinet. Although I like the monochrome, streamlined look, I’ve found that matte-black bathroom accessories unfortunately tend to show dust and lint. (A quick wipe now and then with a wet or dry microfiber cloth takes care of this—when I actually bother to do it.)
Other than that, my only quibble with the Hultarp rack is that its overall magnetic force is weaker than I would like. That force comes from neodymium magnets, which are known to be stronger than most commercially used magnets. But if you remove the Hultarp rack’s mounting piece on the back, you can see that inside it has only several magnet slivers, with mostly empty space in between. As Tim pointed out, because “the magnets’ combined area is what determines overall holding power,” there just aren’t enough of them to deliver a lot of load-bearing.
No weight capacity is listed on IKEAs product page for the Hultarp magnetic rack, but once I added a couple of extra hair shears to its load, bringing the total weight of my items to a mere 9 ounces, the rack could no longer stay in place and instead slid right off my medicine cabinet’s door.
Rather than buy a whole new magnetic organizer, I just went back to my old fridge-magnet hack. I placed two kitchen magnets underneath my Hultarp rack for extra support. Works like a charm.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
