Remember my itty-bitty bathroom... the one that's attached to our bedroom? It's the one we use most often and it is the smallest bathroom in the house. This is it just after we moved in, before anything was put in it:
There are certain things I like to keep in a bathroom. Cleaning supplies, for one, but specifically, extra shampoo/conditioner, razor blade refills, towels, facial cleansers... general toiletries. Unfortunately with such a small space comes almost no storage.
Where are we supposed to put our towels? I hear linen closets are useful for this, but there's no room for one either in our bathroom or in our bedroom. What's a girl to do, when her bathroom is always cluttered like this:
It's not pretty. In reality the wire rack on the window ledge was placed there while I cleaned the shower - it didn't always live on the window ledge. But you get an idea of the cramped, cluttered feeling that our bathroom evoked.
Before we were married, V was trying to think of storage solutions for his new married home, and found a bunch of these wooden boxes for sale. We used them for a myriad of things in our previous home - mostly they served as drawers in the kitchen of our previous cottage. When we moved into our new place, there were drawers! And shelves! We didn't know what to do with these boxes anymore, and into storage they went.
I've seen about a million and a half cute storage ideas around the internet for tiny spaces, but nothing I saw really clicked until... well... not until much, much later. More on that in a minute.
(source)
I found this (above) on Pinterest a few weeks ago but didn't connect bathroom + boxes = solution. Actually, the pin address was wrong, so it originally took me to the homepage for this site - which is in Portuguese. I used my amazing super-savvy Portuguese searching skills (coughGoogleTranslatecough) to find you the link to the actual post... You're welcome.
I was busily cleaning my bathroom when the idea finally made the connection. Right in the middle of scrubbing the toilet, I stood up and almost (probably) shouted, "The wooden boxes we have!!! They can be used as shelves!!!!" Poor V in the other room was busy tinkering with his hobby (which is noisy) so all he heard was my shout, and came running in to make sure I was ok.
"Yes, honey, thank you. It only hurts a little when epiphanies strike."
So I ran excitedly downstairs and fished out two of our boxes, cleaned them, decided/measured where to put them, and V was kind enough to help me hang them (simple screw in the wall, folks). In less than fifteen minutes, my troubles were over!
The boxes/shelves make all the difference in this room. We now have towel storage and toiletry storage... and what you don't see (I slacked off and didn't take a picture) is a little basket down by the toilet holding all the cleaning supplies. Our bathroom is nice and neat, and everything is in it's place.
Because we may be painting our bathroom at some point in the future, I resisted the urge to paint them and line them. For now they are natural, partly because I like them that way and partly because I've yet to decide on a bathroom palette.
It feels so good to be organized!
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