5 simple bathroom storage tips

The bathroom is often one of the smallest rooms in the house – which is rather bemusing considering how much stuff it has to house. Unless a renovation is on the agenda, it's likely you're stuck with the challenges that come with a small bathroom. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few creative things you can do to quickly improve its storage capacity.   [caption id="attachment_5857" align="alignnone" width="690"] Image courtesy of Marie "Konmari" Kondo[/caption]  

1.   Konmari your towels

Marie "Konmari" Kondo and her infamous folding methods have taken the organising world by storm. While most people apply her theories to the bedroom, I recently took it a step further and made the most of the fact that I have nowhere to store my linen at the moment. Instead, I bought some large square plastic containers that are about 15 centimetres deep.

I used Konmari's method to fold my towels into rectangles that stand on their sides. They then fitted neatly into the containers. I put the lids on and stacked them on the wide section of the built-in bath surround. This has worked surprisingly well.

For more handy tips, read Konmari's best-selling book The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organising, and follow her on Facebook.

 

2.   The force of attraction

All those fiddly little metal odds and ends have an unhappy tendency to sit around on the vanity top and eventually cause rust stains. A strip magnet (like the ones you buy from kitchen shops for knives) is ideal in this situation. Install the magnet near the vanity and you’ve got a quick and easily accessibly spot for bobby pins, nail clippers, tweezers, small scissors and other manicure items.

   

3.   Get Sistema-tic

This is not and ad for Sistema containers, but I honestly swear by these things in all areas of my house – including the bathroom. Again, I was searching for a solution to the myriad little items that ended up in a huge mess in the drawers of the vanity. I bought a few containers and used them to house items as varied as cotton buds, bobby pins, floss picks, hair ties and even toothpaste. The lids stop the contents falling out but allow easy access by simply unclipping and lifting one end.

 

4.   Give yourself a lift

Install a shelf above the vanity to hold your additional odds and ends. Don’t worry if your mirror extends from the top to the vanity to the top of the wall. If this is the case buy a chrome extendable wire shelf unit from the kitchen section of K-mart. (You could also look for a pretty timber one in a kitchen shop. Just remember to keep the legs dry or they’ll rot.)

I actually bought some of these to stack shoes on in the bottom of our wardrobes, but realised that the two leftover ones were great for unobtrusive extra shelf space on the bathroom vanity. The ones I bought are 15 centimetres high and 21 centimetres deep and, because they’re wire, they don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.

   

5.   Make every day Boxing Day

The space under the vanity was a disaster. I had some items stored in toiletry bags, spare shampoos stacked at the front of the bottom shelf but nothing behind them because the narrower top shelf got in the way.

First of all, I pulled everything out and took stock of what items could be stored together and where they would fit. I then decided that as the kids are old enough to be trusted, the cleaning items could be stored in a caddy at the end of the bath (next to the towel boxes).

That meant that, because the drawers were organised, all I needed to store under the vanity was toilet paper with two rectangular plastic baskets (one for skin care items and another for hair care products) as well as a rectangular box with a lid for personal items.

It’s amazing how well everything fits now that everything has a container to live in and a place to call home.