Small Bathroom Designs

Most people know pretty well what they want to get out of a bathroom renovation: after all, there are good reasons why you’re planning to renovate the bathroom, right! However, once you get beyond the obvious (fixing a rotten floor, replacing worn or ugly colored fixtures) it can be diffficult to come up with ideas for how the rest of the room should look.

Here’s a variety of bathroom renovation ideas to help you come up with a pleasing design for your new bathroom.

Have a theme

This may be a topic theme (e.g. beach or spa) which is mostly carried out in decorative items and surface finishes, but you can also have a theme that’s carried out more subtly in the shapes and directions of your fixtures and permanent decorations. A rounded theme may be carried out by a curved-edge tub, rounded sink, curved shower rail, curved or rounded ends to towel rails, and curved backsplash edges, for example. A diagonal theme might show up as diagonally laid floor and/or wall tile, wallcovering with a diagonal motif or stripes, and diagonal patterned fabric.

Don’t be afraid to use COLOR

It makes sense for your fixtures and tile to be white or neutral, so they don’t date (pink tub, anyone?), but that means you have plenty of scope to use color elsewhere. In a small bathroom, painting the walls takes little time and less paint, so you can experiment and it’s no big deal to paint over it if you hate it. The door is also a good opportunity for a burst of color. Accessories are even easier to use for color themes.

Consider a monochromatic color scheme

If everything in the background is white, the colored towels and shower curtain make even more of a statement – and you can change colors every so often quite easily.

Try Out Expensive or Labor-Intensive Finishes

In a small area you can use labor-intensive paint finishes that might take too long in a larger room, or expensive wall-covering, or beaded board, or paneling, or anything else which you’d like to try out on a small scale. Just make sure what you choose is, or can be made, water resistant.

Focus on Storage

Most small bathroom designs have a hard time squeezing in enough storage. Consider high storage: a shelf 1ft below ceiling hight along one entire wall will hold a lot of towels and they’ll look decorative too.

Don’t do what a previous owner of my house did though, and install cabinets so low over the tub that they make it impossible for anyone taller than 5 feet to stand up and take a shower!

In-the wall storage is also a possibility: if you have some wall space in an internal wall that doesn’t have plumbing or wirirng in it, but you can’t have anything there that sticks out into the room very far, recessing a cabinet into the wall between the studs may be an option. Not just medicine cabinets, either: a tall cabinet works just as well and can hold a lot.

Improve Ventilation

Improving ventilation is often one of more the neglected bathroom renovation ideas but it can make a surprising amount of diference to your enjoyment of the space. The critical factor here is where the duct to the outside will run: between joists in the ceiling? Through the attic? It absolutely must exit to the outside, not just into the attic.

Size your fan so it’s big enough for the room, but not too big; quiet; and consider installing a timer so the fan doesn’t accidentally get left on for hours. I f you have major moisture problems in the bath (or family that doesn’t turn the fan on) you can hook the fan to a humidistat which measures moisture in the air and automatically turns on the fan whenever needed.