How to make your bathroom look less like a cave.

Warning - the tiles in these photos may cause offence. 

It's not lost on me - get shorlisted for an interior design blog award and then post about how to make a horrible room slightly less horrible. But this is our family bathroom, small and dark and sad like a little tiled cave. Not exactly the best room in the house. At first glance it doesn't look too bad but after a while the dodgy plumbing, floor that doesn't fit properly, terrible DIY, wobbly bath panel and lack of daylight will grind you down. It doesn't look any better when it's clean. The tiles are the worst shade of beige/grey (greige?) and suck all the light out of the room and no amount of scrubbing will get rid of the limescale on the taps. I know, I've tried.

Next year we will gut it and make it light and lovely, but for now it's what we have and I had to make some changes. Mostly very little ones, but together they all made a difference.

1. De-clutter

It's hard to clean a sink when it's covered in, well, everything. Find somewhere to put stuff - a shelf, a cabinet, a wash bag - anywhere but on the edge of the sink. (This is blindingly obvious, so why did it take me four months to do this...?)

I know, that chrome towel storage thing on the left of the sink looks just the ticket, right? No! It's useless and a pain in the neck. The towels all have to be folded just so or they don't fit on and if you take off one, four more fall off with it. I don't need that many folded hand towels next to my sink, I'm not running a hair salon.

Ok, stuff has been moved. Much better.

And that leads me on to the next important thing:

2. Storage

These plastic boxes weren't really doing it for me, too untidy and hard to clean around.

This is where you need to get your drill out. (Or badger someone else to do it. Who am I kidding, I've never drilled anything in my life.)

A mirrored bathroom cabinet holds the toothpaste, hair products, contact lens solution, plasters and Calpol that we use on a regular basis.

And the little shelf underneath is where I put my contact lens pot while I put in or take out my lenses. It's so convenient, right under the mirror. Such a small thing but so important. No more dropped lenses on the floor while I lean over the little cracked mirror!

3. Light

If you cover the one, small, high, north facing window sill with boxes, it will appear darker. I know, incredible!

Also - mirrors help bounce light around a small room. I'd completely forgotten about this trick until the cabinet went up. Instantly there was more light in the room. 

4. Colour

Those two screws above the toilet were from a cabinet that was once there. They annoyed me. That whole wall annoyed me.

Thinking about how much we needed storage in that room, I decided to hang something from them. I crocheted two net bags using cotton and a 2 mm hook, one for flannels and the other for bath toys. The pattern is from Modern Crochet.

Instant colour and storage. 

The print makes such a difference too, just having something pretty and colourful on the wall too look at instead of endless beige tiles. 

5. Scent

Bathrooms are much nicer to be in when they smell nice. One of these room diffusers by an almost permanently open window makes a huge difference.

So, there you have it. It's far from perfect but it's an improvement on what we had before. And a reminder as well that, in a small room, every little inch of storage or daylight can make such a difference to how the space feels.