Small Changes to a Small Bathroom That Made a Difference

So I have explained before that sharing a small bathroom with 4 people is one of the more challenging parts of small living. Our current bathroom is smaller than our previous bathroom but we make it work! And with some clear communication, not locking doors and less is more mentality, we share this small room pretty well. I am still always looking to maximize the space we have and use it more efficiently.

We did some re-evaluating of the small bathroom recently and I realized that something I had moved from our old place, the skinny garbage can, wasn’t really working. In our old place the skinny garbage (Similar Here) fit between the toilet and the vanity. In our current bathroom it sat out in the narrow and precious floorspace. So I decided to look for an even smaller garbage can so it could tuck in the very narrow space between the toilet and the vanity. I landed on the teeniest Muji garbage can (here) that my mom has in her bathroom. I laughed when I first saw it. But really we don’t need a big trash bin in the bathroom. We just need to empty it more often or walk up to the kitchen garbage. This tiny dust bin tucks in beside our toilet and the vanity and it’s really been a small habit change to empty it more regularly. This switch gained us almost a foot of extra space and not visually having to look at a trash bin all the time.

the old trash can tucked between the baseboard heater and tub.

Secondly when I installed our towel warmer (pictured above), I had to take down my skinny ikea shelves that held many of mine and Trevor’s face creams/toiletries etc. I was worried about this. Where would my creams go? Where did we have space? Well our vanity is very disorganized and under-utilized. It’s one of those big empty cabinets with swinging doors with chaos underneath. So we dealt with this a couple ways…

1) Cleaning supply edit - We consolidated cleaning supplies into one bucket. We had too many and weren’t using them. Less is more in this case. I moved some up to the kitchen and used up what was left and recycled some.

2) Face care edit - We carried on with our bathroom products. What wasn’t being used? Use it up! Reccycle! Giveaway! I gave some face oils to my dad who has never used skincare in his life. Passed along a few others and recycled some more.

3) Organization -With the bottom of the vanity cleared I got 2 bins that perfectly filled the bottom ( I didn’t measure, but it worked out). One for me, one for Trevor. Now we also have a limit of what we can fit and fill! And when the small countertop gets filled I know where the stuff goes so we don’t lose it.

4) Bath mat - Aesthetically I hate my black tile floors in my bathroom so I found the largest bath mat (in the 2’ x 5’) I’ve ever heard of by one of my favourite designers and it filled up most of the ugly tile. This just made my small bathroom feel cozier and brighter.

Anyway! I owe you a longer story about the towel wamer….I generally love it. Though it looks much prettier with no towels on it; the coziness of a warmed towel wins over aesthetics in this case! I think I need to get a contact in Japan so I can ask them to make my favourite towels in white or a stripe!

Oh and I’ve thought about updating our toiler paper holder to something cuter like THIS or THIS. But haven’t pulled the trigger.

Another angle of the towel warmer. Cotton sweater here.

Anyway while I have made a couple purchases to update our bathroom, as usual the most effective solution was downsizing what we have in the space and using up what we already bought before buying more! Oh and one more thing I’ll add since I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before, I keep my makeup and hair stuff in my bedroom and use the mirror in my bedroom to mostly get ready in the morning. With 4 people fighting over the bathroom I find this helps! Same with the kids hair brush, I keep it upstairs so before they run out the door they brush their hair and the bathroom is for water related uses.

As always, would love to hear how you make your small bathroom work!

This post contain links, some of which we may earn a small commission from at no additional cost to you. Thanks as always for your support!