Our Bathroom Makeover

A bathroom makeover of our tiny bathroom for 5 people. This room needed a refresh and had some major organizational issues. Here’s what we did!

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In 2020, Chris and I sold our little two-bedroom condo in the suburbs and moved our family of 5 into an even smaller fixer-upper farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. It was a dream come true and an absolute disaster, but over the last year, we’ve worked hard to make this space our own.

Chris and I are not experienced DIY-ers (we don’t even like hanging photos together), but we’re good at living on a budget – and who doesn’t love watching someone else’s hot mess?

You can watch our videos on my YouTube Channel and get all the details about this project below!

After the Kitchen Tour, Instagram followers and YouTube comments demanded a bathroom makeover. So here’s our little (and I mean tiny) bathroom makeover. It’s just phase one. We have a more complete renovation planned (hopefully) for the future, but for now, here’s our bathroom makeover that made it cute and functional for the meantime.

Small Bathroom Makeover

Our bathroom is super-efficient. Like, you can sit on the toilet and wash your hands at the same time. While I know this isn’t unusual for many parts of the world, it is very tiny for a bathroom in the southeast United States – especially for a 3-bedroom house.

My goal for this space was to make it feel as big and open as possible while keeping the makeover very temporary. We hope to renovate the bathroom in the near future, so I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on upgrades.

This post and video also became a mudroom tour, because the bathroom storage kind of bleeds into the mudroom outside it.

Here’s how we took our tiny bathroom and made it cute, organized, and comfortable for a family of 5.

Small Bathroom Organization

We are a family of 5, so while that’s not a huge family, that’s a lot to ask of a tiny bathroom with only a few inches of counter space.

In order to keep the bathroom neat and organized, we store everything in cabinets – not on the floor or on the counter. Whether it’s toothbrushes or the trash can, the less that’s on the counter, on the floor, or hanging on the wall, the cleaner and bigger the whole bathroom feels.

On the open shelf below the gray cabinet, we keep a box of tissues and 1-2 spare rolls of toilet paper. To make sure we don’t run out of toilet paper, one of the daily jobs of the person who cleans the bathroom (kid or adult) is to refill that shelf so it’s always full.

The cabinet below the sink is so small, it barely holds a plunger and a trash can. But keeping both of those items stowed under the sink instead of on the bathroom floor keeps the bathroom more open and clean-feeling.

We have an over-the-door hanging rack for towels and clothes while people shower (or a place to hang toiletry bags when guests visit), but it stays pretty clean unless someone is showering. Instead of storing towels for 5 people in a tiny bathroom, we hung Command hooks on the backs of everyone’s bedroom door. Each kid keeps their towel in their own room.

Whatever doesn’t fit in the cabinets (toiltries for the kids who can’t reach high, extra washcloths, first aid, my makeup, occasional-use toiletries, etc), goes in the drawers and cubbies in the mudroom. It’s right outside the bathroom door, but it doesn’t clutter the inside of the bathroom.

This obviously doesn’t fit everything. We have guest towels, medicine, travel toiletries, and more stored in another place in the house. Because we don’t need access to those things on a daily or even weekly basis, it didn’t make sense to keep it out and accessible, Instead, we have a few bins stored away that are easy to break out whenever guests come or someone needs tylenol.

Small Bathroom Hacks

We hang a few things on the back of the shower curtain for extra storage.

Hard Water Filter

This house has old pipes and hard water. Until we can replace the pipes, we installed this budget-friendly hard water filter on the shower head, and we just replace the filter every few months.

My hair was super unhappy with the hard water, and this helped a lot!

Bidet

Becasue I know it’s in the video and the photos and I’ll get questions, that lever on the side of our toilet is a bidet. It’s amazing. You should get one. Here’s ours!

Paint Colors for a Small Bathroom

The walls were a dark burnt orange color. While this hid some of the dirt and grime, it also made the bathroom feel even smaller than it was. I chose to paint it bright white so it reflected as much light as possible and felt as open and clean as we could make it.

I painted the trim and doors in the mudroom a blue-gray that kept the space fun and interesting. In the bathroom itself, I kept the trim white to make it feel as open as possible.

The green cabinet above the toilet got a makeover with the gray paint I used on the trim in the rest of the house, so the bathroom kind of coordinated.

Even though the rest of the doors in the house are the same blue-gray as the trim and the cabinet, I decided to paint the outside of the bathroom door gray and the inside of it white. Again, my goal was to make a small bathroom feel as big as possible. A white interior did that for me.

I’ve tried several different kinds of paint – from really cheap to more expensive. This time, we used Behr Ultra Paint & Primer. It was a little expensive, but it gave us great coverage. It took about 3 coats to cover the old burnt orange wall color, but I’m really impressed it didn’t take more.

• Bathroom and mudroom walls, bathroom trim: Sherwin Williams 7006 “Extra White” (it has blue tones), Behr Ultra Satin finish
• Mudroom doors and trim, bathroom cabinet: Sherwin Williams 7065 “Argos” (blue-gray), Behr Ultra Semi-gloss finish