House Tour: How to Fit a Minimalist Bathroom and Utility Into 49 Square Feet
We are a family of five living in a total of 750 square feet for several years. Our perspective of what is “necessary” for a space is formed by our experience. How does a family of five function with their bathroom and laundry rooms being the same space? Well, I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you how OUR family does it… And what we love about it. There are downsides, too. I’ll be honest about that! But overall, I find myself very content with our minimalist (and relatively efficient!) bathroom and utility space.
Of course, for me, sharing our small-ish space with the other people in my family has become really normal. If you’ve poked around on the blog, you may have seen our small-ish Common Space. Or our efficient Kitchen Space. We’ve always lived in a small area, and in that sense, we’re just used to it. I grew up in a 1400 square foot house with three sisters, one brother, and my parents. I didn’t have my own bedroom until I was in my final year of university and rented my own little place. So you could say that I’ve been conditioned for life like this!
In this post, I’ll give you a little tour around our very average-to-small minimalist bathroom space, and how we make it work as a utility room as well. This is part of my House Tour series where I share about what our house looks like and how we function in the space we have. So if you enjoy this, feel free to check out my other posts about our living spaces.
Some Statistics on Our House:
- 650 square feet (60 square meters) + bonus bedroom building of about 100 square feet (10 square meters) = 750 square feet liveable space (70 square meters)
- 2 bedrooms/1 bathroom + detached bonus room (and a storage/wood shed)
- Open Concept Living/Dining/Kitchen areas
- Time lived here: 2 years
- Ages of our kids: 6, 3, and 1
- Bathroom/Laundry Room Dimensions: 8 ft 4 in x 6 ft 3 in (255cm x 190cm)
Our minimalist bathroom and utility room are positioned just off the kitchen. The bathroom and two bedrooms are in a row on one side of the house, but the two bedrooms have a bit more space. I think the cottage was added on to by about 4 feet, judging from the flooring and how the ceiling looks in those rooms. As a result, the bathroom is the smallest room in the house. (Which is ironic because it does get probably the most use!).
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Pros About Having a Small, Minimalist Bathroom and Utility Combo:
- Small Spaces = Less Time Cleaning! Our bathroom is small, and we only have one of them. So my cleaning routine for before our Sabbath Day or before company comes is really quick and efficient. I can clean the toilet, sink, mirror, vacuum the corners, mop the floors, and change the towels in about 12 minutes flat. You would think this means my bathroom would always be clean. Unfortunately, it is not. However, it brings me peace of mind to know that I can get it clean really fast!
- With small kids, having the toilet, shower, and washing machine all in one small space is efficient! My system for potty training is not the “train over one weekend and be done with it.” We tend to have a much more “take their diaper off and see how they go” kind of approach. And that means there are quite a few accidents. Which means we do a lot of laundry and a lot of rinsing toddlers off in the shower! Having the washing machine right by the shower definitely makes the laundry process easy!
- We keep extra cosmetics and bathroom supplies to a minimum. Without having lots of drawers and storage space, almost everything I have by way of jewelry and make up and cleaning supplies are either out in the open or in one of my baskets or boxes on open shelves. Although I’m not a fan of visual clutter AT ALL (and the bathroom feels a bit cluttered to me currently), having everything out in the open does remind me to constant evaluate, “Am I using this? Do I really need this?”
Challenges About Having One Bathroom For Our Family:
1. Getting out the door on time:
I always try to have the kids use the toilet before we leave to go anywhere. Only having one (small) bathroom means that we have to be really on top of the schedule to actually get everyone cycled through! We regularly do NOT succeed at this and end up running late.
2. When multiple kids have to pee at once:
This happens more often than I ever thought possible! It’s like the kids all have the same bladder timer! when one of them needs to use the toilet, the other truly believes they need to use the toilet at that EXACT MOMENT too! My solution, if I’m concerned that the child waiting is going to actually have an accident on the floor, is to have them take off their bottom half clothing and jump in the shower to pee. I figure rinsing down the shower is better than cleaning an accident up off the floor!
3. Lots of Traffic = Lots of Mess (and Mysterious Urine Smells):
I’ll be honest, I’m not always sure about the cleanliness standard of our toilet area. My almost-four-year-old isn’t tall enough to just sit down on the toilet seat, so I’m pretty sure she jumps up (since she doesn’t like to use the stool). The six-year-old is a bit more capable when it comes to getting onto the toilet, but it still seems like there are frequently moments that I walk into the bathroom and catch a whiff of… something unpleasant coming from the toilet region.
However, considering that the kids and I are mostly home all day, I’m currently third trimester pregnant with a baby doing jumping jacks on my bladder, and we’re potty training our third kiddo, our toilet gets a LOT of use! And specifically a lot of use by people who aren’t always the most concerned about careful accuracy. So, I just try to clean the toilet every other day or so, and mop the floor around it really well!
4. Bathroom Doorway becomes a Family Bottleneck:
Our bathroom doorway is the biggest bottle neck in our house. Washing your hands at the sink requires you to stand in the doorway of our bathroom. In addition, our dish washer is immediately outside the door of our bathroom. The dishwasher has a cupboard door that opens into the bathroom doorway. Usually we can squeeze past the cupboard door one at a time, but if someone is washing their hands at the sink, it definitely clogs up the flow of people! Additionally, with my pregnant belly at the moment, I am just barely able to get myself through the bathroom doorway when the dishwasher cupboard is open. So we definitely bottleneck at the bathroom door these days!
Entry to Our Minimalist Bathroom and Utility
Stepping into our bathroom, the sink is immediately on the left. I’ve hung some basket shelves on the wall just inside the door, above the sink vanity, to store hair care supplies for the girls (hairbrushes, comb, ponytail holders, headbands, etc). These are within their reach, so they can come get the supplies to brush their own hair during their morning chores time.
Someday I’d like to get a mirrored medicine cabinet for the wall above our sink. But for now, we have an oversized mirror someone gave us for free that helps to open up this space a lot.
Under the sink we have a little storage. The three drawers don’t really work (one is a faux drawer, and the other two have just paper on the bottom, which doesn’t hold anything heavy, so I don’t use them). But there is a cupboard one each side of the drawers, and I do use them to store stuff. In the left cupboard, I keep wash clothes, hand towels, and a few of my less-frequently-used hair-care items. In the right cupboard, we keep our kid’s beach towels and extra shampoo and conditioner.
Next to the Shower Zone
Between the sink and the shower, we have a heated towel rack. I keep my towel, Gabe’s towel, and our hand towel on the heated towel rack. Lazlo’s little toilet also hangs out on the floor here.
Above the heated towel rack are two shelves. The bottom shelf is our toothbrush station, deodorant station, and my skincare station.
We have two Oral B toothbrushes with four (color-coded) toothbrush heads for our family. If you haven’t yet transitioned to electric toothbrushes, I highly recommend it! I’m a very diligent tooth-brusher, and I’ve tried a lot of different manual toothbrushes, including some high end ones that our dentist recommended to us… And our electric toothbrushes DEFINITELY deliver on making my teeth feel clean. (We still brush Lazlo’s teeth with a baby manual toothbrush, but the girls have the same toothbrush heads as we do since they’re relatively small heads).
On that bottom shelf next to our teeth care box, I have a small makeup bag with my mascara, eye shadow, and eye liner, which is literally as complicated as my makeup routine gets these days! And then I have a small box with my face moisturizer, some extra hair claws and bobbi pins and pony tail holders. I also have perfume, a manicure set, dry shampoo, and leave in conditioner.
The top shelf has one of my plants (a Peace Lily), and a basket for Gabe to keep his odds and ends in. I think he has his allergy medicine, his shaving equipment, contact solution, and some of his own skin care and odds and ends like fingernail clippers in there. To be honest, I’m not really sure!
Shower Contents:
We have a bottle of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower, along with a bar of soap. I usually keep a comb in the shower so I can comb my hair and the girls’ hair. And we also have Animal Squigz. Our kids LOVE these things! They’re silicone suction cup bath toys that get a lot of use. (And the day I took pictures, the diaper pail was soaking in the shower!)
We also have a squeegee and mold. The mold is not on purpose, but I’m just keeping it real over here! Mold growth in NZ is no joke, and our shower has a shower dome on top of it (like a heavy duty plastic piece that keeps the moist air mostly contained inside the glass doors and walls of the shower. I love our shower dome because it really helps keep the humidity down in the entire bathroom, but it means that even with squeegeeing down the walls and door after every round of showers, unless we’re REALLY careful to keep our shower door open as much as possible, we get a lot of mold growing in the caulking.
If you are a mold expert reading this and really skilled at finding ways to keep mold growth down, please comment below and tell me what I should be doing! I usually clean with a water/vinegar solution every week, just spraying down the shower and scrubbing those caulked areas. I also have a natural all-purpose cleaner that I love the smell of and love how it cleans all the surfaces of the shower, but it doesn’t seem to keep the mold from growing all that much. We also recaulk the shower about every 6 months, cutting out the old stuff, bleaching the surfaces, and then recaulking… but that’s about the only way to hit “refresh” on the mold growth.
The Toilet Zone of Our Minimalist Bathroom and Utility:
Moving on to the toilet section of our minimalist bathroom and utility. Next to the shower is our toilet. I have over the door hooks on the shower so we have some hanging storage options for a shower cap and bathrooms outside of the shower.
On the toilet itself, we have a diaper sprayer that came with us on our last move. Since we cloth diaper our kiddos, it is so nice to have the convenience of a diaper sprayer. Next to the toilet I keep the bathroom garbage bin and the toilet bowl cleaner. And as close as possible without causing a tripping hazard, our diaper pail as well (with a nice, tight-fitting lid!).
On the shelf above and to the right of the toilet, we keep our spare towel supply, our extra toilet paper, another plant (a snake plant), and two plastic bins. One bin contains bandaids and medical tape and first aid ointments, and the other contains tampons and pads. I also have my stash of witch hazel, aloe, and peri-bottle ready to go for when postpartum season arrives!
The kids’ towels hang on hooks from the bottom of this shelf, and I also have a sitz bath ready to go for postpartum as well.
The Laundry Area of the Room:
We have a front-loading washing machine. Initially it was turned so that the door of the washing machine opened toward the sink. Which meant the bathroom door had to be shut in order to get anything in or out of the washing machine. There was a temporary wall built where the door now opens (toward the toilet), and structures to mount a front-opening dryer above the washing machine.
We asked our landlords if we could remove the wall and build shelves in that space instead. They were fine with it, so Gabe took down the wall and built our 3 open shelves above the washing machine space, foregoing the spot for a dryer inside our bathroom and utility room.
So now we have a washing machine that opens into the largest part of the room! Gabe also built a stand to go underneath the washing machine. I keep a basket for our dirty laundry under the machine itself. We don’t sort our laundry at all. We wash everything on a relatively cool wash with all colors, so having just one basket works for us.
On the shelves above the washing machine I have our cleaning supplies along with laundry detergent. I also have our extra paper towel supply, and a box with extra hand soap, extra toothbrush heads, and dental floss and bar soap. And up on the top shelf we have a box that contains my hair cutting supplies, my period panties supplies, our bleach and ant poison, and any other random chemicals that we need to make sure are out of the kids’ reach!
On the back of the door:
And, of course, since this is a small, minimalist bathroom and utility space that needs to serve a lot of purposes, we do have an over the door rack that we utilize to its fullest capacity, I think!
On the two shelves of the rack, I keep sunscreen and various hair gel, hair spray, mousse, and laundry bags for washing delicate items on one shelf. And on the second shelf I keep our medications: cough syrup, infant tylenol, ibuprofen, etc. Everything we don’t want the kids to have access to.
The hooks underneath the rack store a potty training toilet seat right now, and a stool.
Things We’ve Learned Having a Minimalist Bathroom and Utility Combo:
Our old apartment had a closet in the bathroom that served as a linen closet, cleaning supply storage, etc. We also had the washing machine in a different room. Moving into this house was an increase by 50% in the floor space. But our bathroom and utility situation definitely changed.
We’ve had to adjust a few things in our bathroom and utility room habits:
1. We try to avoid stocking up a lot of stuff in advance.
Yes, sometimes we run out of shampoo or soap or laundry detergent. But really, it’s not that hard to go get SOMETHING within 24 hours of when you realize you’re out. Or run up to our landlords and ask if we can borrow a squeeze of shampoo. And we try to just monitor our supply and only buy additional consumable products when we’re getting low. That way we’re not keeping a large inventory of stock.
2. We’ve embraced being rather open about our bathroom stuff and habits.
There isn’t a lot of hidden storage spaces in our bathroom, so we just have adopted an “if you’re in our home, you’re going to know who we really are, including our bathroom information” mindset. I know this is kind of a weird idea if you come from an appearance-upkeeping-type culture! But I’ve found it tremendously freeing and community building. Perhaps it’s just the circles I run in, but most of my friends don’t have their own private master bathroom and then a guest bathroom for guests to use. So I guess we’re all just used to a bit more familial intimacy in our friendships.
3. We’ve chosen to prioritize being relatively low maintenance with our stuff – particularly our laundry system.
In general, Gabe and I don’t purchase super expensive clothing items. Almost everything I have in my closet is either 15+ years old. (Or I’ve gotten second hand via thrift stores or hand-me-downs). Gabe spends more-per-item on his things than I do. But he keeps a lesser amount of things in each category of clothing, and he buys with the intentionality of things that can be worn ruggedly. This helps us streamline our laundry process and generally not need as many specialized things around.
4. We’ve gotten creative with our space and put our dryer inside our woodshed.
This is also a bit more of a New Zealand thing, I think. We have a laundry line that I try to hang our clothes on when the weather is favorable. Our laundry line happens to be mostly under cover, so that means we CAN hang clothes a lot of the time. (It doesn’t mean we always DO – the dryer is definitely convenient!). But having the dryer out in the woodshed means we save space in our home. And we also have a little bit of a barrier that compels me to ask myself, “Could I just hang this load really quickly rather than tossing it in the machine?” which, ultimately, probably helps the longevity of our clothing and definitely helps cut down our energy costs!
Your Turn: What Do You Think of our Minimalist Bathroom and Utility?
Do you do anything really clever in your bathroom or utility that would be helpful for me to integrate into our system? Do you have a minimalist bathroom and utility space? Is there anything here that you found inspiring or beneficial? I’d love to know in the comments below! Drop me a line and share your wisdom – I’m always looking for ways I can improve!
(PS: We fold our laundry on our dining room table, kitchen counter, or on our bed, in case you’re wondering. That way there is space in the room to recruit the kids to help!!)