3 Clever Storage Rules for Small Bathrooms

Disclosure:  This sponsored post was written by Allison Swan, an interior designer. She aims to find solutions to common design problems and believes in the power of organization to improve life.

Small spaces can be charming, but also pose tremendous design challenges. Particularly, the smaller bathrooms in your house can be cute but problematic from an organizational perspective. Where are you supposed to keep everything? Finding practical solutions to this question has become the specialty of many interior decorators. Keeping a small bathroom space tidy and stylish is an ultimate challenge, but not an impossible one.

Despite the design dilemmas they create, a small bathroom can become your favorite room with just a few clever storage solutions. By following three rules of thumb, you can create a more inviting and chic small bathroom.

Maximize Wall Space

When space is at an absolute minimum, get creative with your wall space. Because walls are not the greatest places to store items, the main solution is to build out from the wall and create elegant shelf space. Shelf space is cheap and simple to install on your bathroom’s walls. Whether you prefer wood or metal shelving, installing a few shelves can provide you with ample space to store toiletries, decorative objects, and towels. If you want to go for fun and quirky shelves (like a triangle-shaped one, for instance), then you can simply attach your wood pieces together using a PVA glue for wood.

Your bathroom wall shelves can be the more standard, rectangular variety or the more trendy curved or semi-circle variety. You can paint your shelves to integrate with your small bathroom’s theme and color scheme. Another shelving solution involves installing corner shelves — a tiered set of two to three shelves that create functional storage space out of your bathroom’s underused corners.

Another way to maximize your bathroom’s walls pace is to install hooks. Hooks are invaluable in bathrooms for hanging clothes, robes and towels. They also offer a spot to hang a necklace while bathing. Hooks can be ornamental and elegant additions. They don’t have to be awkward eyesores. Try placing large, sturdy hooks on the back of the bathroom door and smaller hooks closer to the vanity mirror area.

Create Hidden Storage

If you think there’s nowhere to store anything in your small bathroom, you might be wrong. Storing items under the sink works fairly well but is best suited to toiletries and other hard supplies rather than linens. You can design your own “hidden” storage space by focusing on the area on the inside of your bathroom above the door. Most bathrooms have enough space to install a long shelf above the door where you can store linens and cleaning supplies. You might also want to invest in a set of hooks to rest atop the back of the door. These two items alone can make a big difference in the storage capacity of a small space.

Another way to create hidden storage is to install a “Lazy Susan”–style shelving set underneath your bathroom sink. This can improve your organization as well, since it offers better visibility of secretly stored items. You can also create storage inserts for your bathroom drawers to divide the space up, creating separate spots for smaller items like hair ties, and larger items like brushes and curlers.

Cut the Cabinet Clutter

Small spaces are prone to clutter. Instead of throwing everything into the medicine cabinet helter-skelter, follow these three tips to cut the clutter:

• Add magnetic strips to the inside of your medicine cabinet mirror. These can come in handy for holding anything small and metallic. They are particularly helpful for organizing grooming aids like nail clippers, tweezers, small scissors, razorblades and Bobby pins. The small stuff can create the most chaos in a small space.
• Use labels. You may think you can remember what’s inside of every bottle and box, but the odds are actually against you. Label every item you place in your cabinet for easy identification.
• Don’t keep wet items like toothbrushes and toothpaste inside your medicine cabinet. Instead, invest in a suction wall-hanging toothbrush and toothpaste holder.
• Avoid keeping bar soap in your medicine cabinet by storing it out in the open in a specialized holder. This can prevent soap scum from infesting your cabinet.
• Keep all your medicine together on one shelf if possible. Make sure pills are always kept in their original labeled containers and safely sealed. If you are unsure what’s in a pill bottle or you know you’ve had it for years without using it, it’s probably a good idea to toss it.