How to Store Candles

Candle storage has always been a bit of a problem in our homes. They’re usually round, often breakable, and come in a wide range of sizes from tiny tealights to big tapers. Each of those characteristics presents a different storage challenge.

For years, candles have been haphazardly placed all around the house wherever they would fit on a shelf or in a drawer. You could find extra candles in the office cabinet, bathroom closet, dining room credenza, and even in the cleaning closet. Of course, that lack of consistency meant some would be forgotten and it was easy to impulse-buy more when I didn’t really need them.

It was past time to undo the candle chaos and come up with a better storage solution. Since every home is different, I’m going to share the easy steps you should start with and then several potential storage ideas.

First, before you do anything else, go on a hunt throughout your home and gather every candle you can find into one location like the kitchen counter or table. If you have kids, let them play along for some kind of small reward.

Once you’re sure you’ve checked all your hiding spots, group the candles by size/type, for example, all the tea lights in one pile and tapers in another. This will help you decide how much storage space you need and what kind of containers could be helpful.

Before storing any of the candles, I choose the ones I wanted to keep out around the house. I like to sprinkle them around the house as functional decor, including by the bathtub and on my desk in the office.

Once you’ve done that, think about potential storage locations within your home for the rest of your collection. I decided that our dining room made the most sense for us. It’s easy to access and close to the kitchen, where we use the candles most often.

I wish I could say that had plenty of room in the credenza to just add all the candles and call it a day, but that wasn’t the case. Because the shelves are low to the ground and deep, but not very tall, if I put the jar candles on the shelves, I’d only be able to see the front row. Since I seem to have scents for every season, this isn’t practical. The credenza drawer works for some candles, but the glass jars take up a lot of space, plus roll around if placed on their side where I can see the label.

I found the perfect solution in the kitchen department. Storage containers for cups/mugs come in the perfect dimensions to hold Bath & Body Works Candles and others of similar sizes.

They can be placed in the divided container label side up, so it’s always easy to find exactly what you want. In the picture below, you can see that the padded dividers are versatile and can be shifted to hold tapers.

I keep the container under the credenza in the dining room, but it could also slide under a bed or onto a closet shelf.

For our other candles, I used clear refrigerator bins to separate them by type in the drawer. It’s perfect for our tapers, tealights, votives, and overflow jars that don’t fit in the main organizer.

If you don’t have drawer space, photo boxes are an affordable options to keep smaller candles organized. Ours used to be in the small tornado shelter closet. I’m excited to repurpose the boxes for something else in that space now!

I was chatting online with my best friend Angela from Blue i Style earlier this week and at the same exact time, we sent messages to each other that we were working on posts about candle organization. We’re both big advocates of collaboration over competition with each other, so I highly recommend checking out her candle organization ideas next.

You’ll drool over her tiered candle cabinet and love the solution for pillars!