They say bathrooms are a decent place to huddle during tornados. But that’s not the only relationship between twisters and loos: In a matter of a morning, a bathroom can easily go from looking organized to looking like the fallout of at least an F-1 funnel cloud. Here’s what you can do about it.
The Problem
That there is a single room used both for washing our bodies and—ahem—relieving ourselves is a little strange if you stop to consider it. Maybe for efficiency’s sake, we condensed our most basic and humbling functions into one room. There can be a lot of tools and trappings involved: from towels to toilet paper, from lotions to lighted mirrors, and from room sprays to hairsprays. Your typical bathroom has, at best, a mere medicine cabinet and vanity to manage it all. Pre-fab cupboards and cabinets may answer your need for a place to put things, but they’re not always great at helping you organize those things. Whether you see that clutter when you walk into the room or see it when you open your drawers or cabinets, it’s still clutter.
The Band-Aid
Some common suggestions include using more vertical space, rolling rather than folding your towels, and using towel hooks rather than rods. A search on Pinterest produces lots of cute ideas, too, things like over-the-door plastic shoe holders and repurposed wooden crates for towels. But most of these “solutions” give you the converse problem of your pre-fab cabinetry: rather than conceal without organizing, they organize without concealing.
The Solution
As with any room in the home, custom built-ins in the bathroom can help you with both concealing and organizing your wares, and they do it in the most efficient and attractive way possible. When you customize your built-ins, you do a couple of things: meet your specific storage/display needs and match your specific room dimensions/décor. Not only can you conceal and organize in one fell swoop, but also you can increase the value of your home and make your bathroom routines—including cleanup—faster and more efficient. When everything in the room has a just-right home, you can have a just-right bathroom!