How to have an Organized Small Bathroom: Minimalist Family of 4 Home Tour
Are you looking for inspiration to have and maintain an organized small bathroom for your family’s needs? Bathrooms are one of the most highly trafficked rooms in the house, especially if you have young kids!
It seems like wherever I go in our home, I have two young kids right at my feet. And our small bathroom is no exception.
I have found maintaining an organized, functional bathroom for our family makes our life better! I can easily clean it, tidy it, make it presentable for company, and enjoy using the bathroom… or at least not having my stress levels spike when I need to use the toilet!
Come check out our small, organized family bathroom to get some ideas on how we live in a small space and thrive as a family. And gather some ideas for how to organize your own small bathroom!
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. See my full disclosure here.
Why Do We Keep Our Bathroom Organized?
I’ve been doing a series on how our family organizes our space – we are a family of four, living in a rented apartment about 450 feet square – and I’ve covered our TINY kitchen, my husband’s and my bedroom, and today I’ll talk about our organized bathroom. I’ll also show our kids’ room and living/dining room. So if you are enjoy this series, keep an eye out for those as well.
But WHY worry about having an organized small bathroom?
Well, an UN-organized small bathroom is not enjoyable at all. With limited storage space, not a lot of counter space, and the small floor space, if there is clutter or inefficient storage, it really compounds quickly. And it can become dirty really easily too, especially with young kids.
We have one bathroom, and it is actually the ensuite to our bedroom (our apartment is technically a one-bedroom apartment – we have a storage room/utility room that we use for the girls’ bedroom).
As long as our small bathroom doesn’t get cluttered up with unnecessary stuff, it works fine.
And honestly, I just feel like a better human being when I inhabit an organized and tidy space. I think some people are really, really CLEAN people (like, regarding germs), but I mostly try to be a really, really TIDY and ORGANIZED person. And, I figure that also helps take care of the germs because cleaning is then a lot easier!
Where to Start to have an Organized Small Bathroom?
There are several steps to undertake in order to get to the point of having a tidy, organized small bathroom.
- Step 1: The first step to organize a small bathroom is to make sure you don’t have too much stuff. This is also known as decluttering!
Duplicates, expired products, shampoo you hate the smell of, or conditioner that leaves your hair greasy – just toss it. I know, you probably spent money on it. Give it away if you can. But don’t let a sunk cost investment continue to drain your valuable bathroom real estate. - Step 2: The second step to having an organized small bathroom is to allocate a home to everything. If something doesn’t have a home to live in, it will either end up on your counter, or it’ll get shuffled from surface to surface.
If you want to keep your bathroom looking organized and tidy, you need to work at putting everything away when you are done using it. And to put it away, it needs a place to go! - Step 3: The third step to having an organized small bathroom is cleaning up after yourself. The bathroom won’t tidy and organize itself, unfortunately, so you’ll have to do it!
It helps to have tidying up as part of your daily routines. So, for example, when I get dressed and put on make up in the morning, before I leave the bathroom to go do something else, I put my make up away and wipe down the counter.
And before I go to bed at night, I brush and floss my teeth, and then put away the toothbrush and the floss and wipe down the counter.
The Layout for Our Organized Small Bathroom:
When you step into our bathroom, the sink and vanity is on your left, and a small closet is on your right. The hot water heater is inside the closet, along with several shelves for storing towels and such. Under the sink are two drawers.
Once you step in past the vanity and the closet, there is a toilet to the right, a towel heater rack directly ahead on the wall, and a shower with a glass door to the left.
And that’s it! The space is only about 3 steps long.
There aren’t a lot of shelves or cupboards to hide things in, so most things live inside a drawer or the closet. We keep only the bare essentials (or things that get really regularly used) out in the open.
The Sink and Organized Vanity:
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this series, I’m a big fan of cleared-off surface spaces. So I prioritize keeping my bathroom sink and counter clear, other than the bottle of hand soap. This makes cleaning it and doing the daily wipe-down super easy.
And those daily wipe-downs usually happen morning and night. Once a week I get out some cleaner and actually clean the sink and vanity surfaces. But otherwise, it just gets a simple wipe down with a rag.
One of the things that does stay out on the floor space of the bathroom is our diaper pail. We cloth diaper, so having the pail to put the wet, soiled diapers in after spraying off any solids into the toilet is a necessity.
Under the sink are two drawers. Our top drawer has my odds and ends on one side (make up bag, hairspray, extra hair ties, moisturizer, etc). On the other side is my husband’s odds and ends (his shaving stuff, contact solution, etc). There’s a small middle section which is where we keep our deodorant.
The bottom drawer has a few essential oil restocks on one side, and rags and wash clothes on the other side.
The Shower Corner of our Organized Small Bathroom:
Just further on from the sink, we have a shower with a glass door. We hang an over-the-door hook on the shower door so we can hang our “bath” from it to dry. The bath is an under-the-bed tray that I put on the bottom of the shower and let the kids splash around in when they are grumpy! When the tray is dry, we typically keep it under our bed just outside the bathroom door.
Along the back wall of the bathroom, there is a heated towel rack. This seems like an absolute luxury to my American self, but here in New Zealand it is pretty common. We keep all of our towels on it – the girls’ hooded towels hang from the sides, and Gabe’s and mine on the rack. The heated bars serve as an excellent place to dry something overnight if needed.
The Toilet Corner of our Small Organized Bathroom:
And in the back corner of the bathroom is our toilet and a window. A basket secured with command hooks houses a few extra toilet paper rolls next to the toilet in easy reach.
On the back of the door into the bathroom we have some over-the-door-hooks. I have my daughter’s bathrobe hanging there right now, and some foam bath toys in a bag.
Bonus: Bathroom Storage Spot to Help With Organization
Closet Storage inside our Small Organized Bathroom:
Something that helps a lot in our small organized bathroom is having a little closet. Our hot-water closet with two sliding doors is behind the bathroom door, which provides excellent storage to keep our bathroom organized! On half of the closet and across the top there are shelves which serve as bathroom storage.
Under the shelves, on the floor, we keep our main toilet paper stash. My kids love to help take the toilet paper rolls out of the big packages they come in and carefully stack them into the space. It’s a pretty good parenting win (as long as they don’t start unraveling the rolls) because they do the storing for me, and it keeps them occupied and makes them feel like they’re helping!
The next shelf up is our towels (rolled) and our spare bed linens (also rolled).
The next shelf up has our grab-everyday kind of stuff I didn’t want the kids to be able to reach. This is where I keep my bobbi pins, scrunchy, and the jewelry I use most frequently. We also have a spare bar of soap, my husband’s electric razor, my barber scissors and comb, spare shampoo, etc.
I usually keep the next shelf up free of any permanent items and cycle our folded laundry through here in the winter. If we keep it there for 24-48 hours, it is usually dry enough to be put away. The heat from the hot water heater can help dry everything. I also keep laundry pegs on the wires here so I can clip up my undies, or reusable bamboo breast pads, or period undies (these are my favorite of what I’ve tried!) to dry slightly faster.
Across the top of the closet we have a shelf that holds three baskets. One basket is where we keep our spare pillow cases. The next basket has medicines, sunscreen, and first aid supplies. And the third basket has our more aggressive cleaning supplies. I don’t usually use them, but there were some cleaning supplies that our landlords furnished when we moved in.
Since I didn’t want to throw them out, I stashed them up there. I also keep my homemade, non-heavily-chemical’d multi-purpose scrub (which I use on the sink, the shower, and the toilet).
Bathroom Aesthetics Too, Of Course!
Keeping our organized small bathroom clean and tidy goes a long way toward making the space feel nice and peaceful. But I also like to have something a bit cozy and personal, even in a bathroom.
I know art work or photos aren’t typical bathroom decor, but if you have a clean, organized bathroom and still feel like it needs some jazzing up, consider adding some photos.
We have photos of my sisters and me in a bubble bath as young kids, my husband and his older brother in a bath as young kids, and then each of our kids in a bath at some point.
It’s a fun conversation point that many people have commented on.
I also have the words to a Liturgy for Changing Diapers (from this book) just stuck up with sticky tack… Because I use cloth diapers, I spend a fair amount of time in the bathroom spraying off the diapers. I always find it encouraging to read over the liturgy there!
Your Turn:
How do you organize your bathroom? Are there any amazing tricks you’ve used? I generally think a bathroom is pretty standard, but I’d love to know how you have individualized your space.
What do you prioritize in a bathroom space? Let me know in the comments below! As always, thanks for sharing your ideas with the rest of the community here. I love collecting ideas from other people and utilizing the ones that resonate with me!