Getting More Bathroom Space For more good reading, check out our complete articles index.

Window light. Abundant natural light and a unified color palette make this small bath seem more spacious. If it looks at though the guy who built your home did everything in his power to make the bathrooms as small and featureless as possible, that's probably exactly what he did.

When your old house was built, 30 or more years ago, a grand bathroom was probably not a big selling point. Buyers wanted spacious living areas and large bedrooms, breezy porches. The bathroom was considered one of those utility areas like the laundry room and furnace room that got tucked in wherever it would fit, in the smallest size that would accommodate the functions it needed to perform. If the builder had provided a grand bath, buyers would have wondered why he was wasting all that perfectly good space.

Now that the bathroom concept has changed into a spacious room for relaxation and repose, its hard to find the roominess you need in the standard functional 5" by 9" bathroom. But, if you want more features in your bathroom than the standard sink/tub/toilet, then more room is going to be required from somewhere.

You have three basic options:

•  Actually find more space from outside the existing bath that can be added to make the room physically larger;

•  Reconfigure the items in the bath to release space, making better use of the existing floor space or

•  Trick the eye into thinking the existing space is larger and airier than it actually is.

Adding Space to the Bathroom
You have two ways of adding space to your bathroom: Take some space from an adjacent room or build an addition. Of the two, stealing existing space is usually less expensive, so let's look at that first.

Stealing Space from Another Room Annexing an entire room to enlarge a bath can produce dramatic results, but not everyone can grab that much real estate from an existing floor plan. If you can't confiscate an adjacent room to create your ideal bath, consider a less Finding More Bathroom Space - a Tiny Bathroom. Careful planning and careful fixture selection can create a comfortable bath in even the smallest spaces. This Victorian-style bath featuring St. Thomas fixtures and Strom's hand-polished chrome faucets, fits in a 5' x 8' space. ambitious acquisition. Does a closet adjoin the bath? Perhaps utility space harbors idle square footage next to its lone water heater. Even small gains can transform an ordinary bath into a more inviting and functional space.

Look in the Closet: OK, no one actually has enough closet space. But if it comes down to sacrificing a little closet space for a spacious new bath, can't you do without those kayak paddles from your senior class rowing trip? Snatching an adjacent closet (or one already in the room) to enlarge an existing bath is a time-honored space-getting trick. Even part of a closet might do. Fixtures by Duravit This handsome bath was built at one end of a 48-inch hallway. This handsome and functional guest bath complete with shower and towel warmer was built at one end of a 48-inch hallway. Wall-hung fixtures make the floor space look much larger than it really is. A guest room with a large closet probably does not need all that much space. Leave some of it for the kids when they visit, and donate the rest to the bathroom.

A large closet can even be converted into a small powder room. We have seen perfectly functional 1/2 baths in a 3' x 5' space. Small, yes, but it works.

Converting the Spare Bedroom: How many times a year do you use your guest bedroom? Three, four times? The rest of the time it accumulates clutter and serves merely as a place for you to practice your dusting skills. Who needs that spare bedroom more — an occasional guest or your busy household? Commandeer the whole bedroom for a spacious bath, or grab part of it to expand a nearby bath. You can considerably reduce the size of all but the smallest guest rooms by replacing the bed with a futon or hide-away bed, or even by bolting a Murphy bed to the wall. Stealing just two feet along a 10-foot common wall would increase the size of a small bathroom by 50%. Definitely worth doing.

Don't Spare the Stair: If there is space under your staircase, you can put it to work as a powder room. Or, turn it into storage and convert another closet elsewhere in the house.

Building More Space If there is no economical or convenient way to get the needed space from another room inside the house, the only option may be to build some more space. There are two ways of doing so, a bump-out and an actual addition.

Bump-Out a Wall: If there's nowhere to go but out, a bump-out or cantilevered wall projection can provide extra square feet for a tub or shower without the need for a full addition with its expensive footings. You can gain as much as 2 feet of additional space. This may not sound like much, but it would increase the floor space in a typical small bath by 25%. Not all houses suit this option - for one thing all the floor joists must run the right way, but if it works, it's a relatively inexpensive way of gaining new space for the bathroom.

Consider an Addition: Often by far the most expensive option, sometimes an addition is the only one. We can build an addition for you, and design the bathroom into it, all at the same time. The nice thing about an addition is that you can build it to fit the bathroom rather than having to design the bathroom to fit the available space. The only restrictions are lot size and set-back requirements, and, of course, your budget. For more information on designing and building an addition, start with Planning Your House Addition.

Finding More Space Inside the Bathroom
Once you have gathered all the space you can from outside the bathroom, its time to look at the bathroom itself. You can make even the tiniest bath work hard and feel bigger, brighter, and bolder if you follow these simple steps.

Artful bathroom design is about packing a lot of efficiency, a sense of openness, and great style into tight quarters. The challenge is to maximize apparent floor area while accommodating the trio of plumbing necessities - sink, toilet, and tub and/or shower - that collectively demand so much square footage. Here are some ideas we have gathered over the years that you may find useful.

Rethink the Bathroom Door Just about the first thing we look at is an opportunity to reverse the bathroom door. A door that opens out into the hallway rather than into the bathroom frees up a lot of space that can become useful storage, and, if nothing else, makes the bathroom seem larger. It's not always possible, but if it is possible, it's usually worth doing.

Photo: Wilsonart International Install a narrower vanity to increase floor space. Elegant baths do not have to occupy large rooms. Install a narrow vanity with a sink bump-out. Add large mirrors to create the illusion of more space. Or, how about a pocket door? Replacing a hinged door with sliding pocket door also frees up the area inside the bathroom required for the door to swing. It's usually more expensive than reversing an existing door, but where there is no room for a swing-out door, a pocket door may work. The new pocket doors, unlike many earlier models, are sturdy, robust, and will provide trouble-free operation for the life of the room.

Rearrange and Replace Reconfigure fixtures to help traffic flow and eliminate wasted space. Replace a large vanity with a shallow vanity or counter top. A vanity is typically 21" deep. You don't need that much room to brush your teeth. Except around the sink, the vanity can be as little as 12" deep. Ok, you only opened up an additional 9" of floor space, but it’s amazing how much it adds that feeling of spaciousness and freedom of movement.

Replace Bulky with Sleek and Slim: Substitute sleek, slim fixtures for bulky ones. Dump the vanity entirely and install a pedestal sink, better yet, a wall-mounted sink. If your family prefers showers to baths, eliminate the tub and install a shower instead. A shower can take up much less room than a full-size tub, often as little as half.

Don't Waste Corner Space: Corners are big opportunities. Consider corner fixtures such as tubs, showers, and vanities. Replacing a full-size tub with a corner tub saves as much as 1/3rd of the tub's floor space.

Build in More Storage Most baths have a basic storage package: The bathroom vanity, a medicine cabinet and, if large enough, a linen cabinet or linen closet. Medicine cabinets are usually too small. In the 1940's when they became common, they were probably big enough for the Gillette Safety Razor, the Burma Shave and Right Guard Stick. Now, however, they don't even hold all the vitamins. Vanity storage is dark, inconvenient and competes with water and drain pipes. Linen closets are usually too narrow and too deep to be practical. We have never figured out why anyone ever though a closet two feet deep and 16" wide was useful for anything other than losing whatever is put in there.

Since storage usually has to be vastly improved anyway, use the opportunity capture some more space inside the bath.

Put Bare Walls to Work: Bathroom remodel - Wall cabinets. Wall cabinets are not just for kitchens. They can be used to add convenient and attractive bath storage. Photo: Julius Blum, GmbH. Wrap around sink drawer Wrap a shallow drawer around the vanity sink to provide gobs or storage for the items that usually go in (and frequently fall out of) the medicine cabinet. Put those bare walls to work. Any wall not covered by the shower, sink or toilet is a storage opportunity waiting to be built. The space in the wall between studs is ideal shallow storage that can run from floor to ceiling. How about a floor to ceiling medicine cabinet built right into the wall? Who else even has one?

Wall cabinets are typical in kitchens for convenient storage, rare in bathrooms. But shallow. bathroom-style wall cabinets on both sides of the sink and above the toilet provide very useful and convenient storage for linens and all sorts of personal items. Corner wall cabinets that open from two sides are especially accessible and effective on both sides of the lavatory.

Revamp the Bathroom Vanity: Typical vanities are awful storage. The large space under the sink is dark, uninviting and full of pipes. Whatever gets pushed to the back is pretty much lost forever. Pull out trays and baskets are needed to make this space even marginally effective storage.

A new idea we think has a great deal of merit is a wrap-around drawer under the sink. The drawer has a cut-out that fits around the sink and compartments to hold all the things you use at the sink — brushes, pins, Q-tips, hair bands and so on. If the vanity is being custom made, the drawer are a simple addition. If the cabinets are factory-made, the drawers are simple enough to convert out of a regular drawer.

Use Toe-Kick Space: Create a space in the toe kick space under the vanity to hide the bathroom scale. Toe-kick space in a bathroom is usually completely unused, but has a lot of potential for storage. See Using Toe-Kick Space for more ideas. Bathroom remodel - In-Wall cabinets. If possible, built storage into the walls. The 4" inside a typical cavity wall provides an opportunity for convenient storage that does not take up space inside the bathroom.

Photo: Diamond Cabinets. Bathroom remodel - Toe Kick Storage. The toe-kick area under the vanity can provide useful additional storage using a special drawer. Replace the Hamper: Get the hamper out of the way. We have never seen a traditional bathroom in which there was actually room for a hamper. It gets stuck in wherever it will fit — and most of the time it doesn't fit. A hamper can be built into a vanity or other cabinet, even into a wall.

One of the most creative ideas we have seen was a tip-out hamper built into the wall adjoining the laundry room. It tipped out in the laundry room to unload the clothes into the washer. How about a laundry-chute? A lot of old houses had them, and we don't understand why they fell out of favor. A small hatch in the wall of the bathroom for a chute takes up a lot less space than a hamper, and is a lot more convenient for mom come laundry day.

Consider a Power Cabinet: Another idea we like a lot and build often is a "power" cabinet. In a narrow cabinet on the right side of the vanity (left side for southpaws) we install a drawer deep enough to hold a hair dryer and add a GFI electrical outlet inside the drawer

Plug electrical appliances — hair driers, curling irons, hot rollers, electric toothbrushes — in the outlet and store them in the trays when not in use. All those electrical cords snaking across the countertop are now gone forever: hidden behind the cabinet door. An outlet can also be installed inside a wall cabinet, or, as a last resort, beneath the sink in the vanity.
Creating the Illusion of More Bathroom Space
Once you have examined every possible avenue to actually creating more space, it may be time to look at what can be done to make the available space seem roomier and make it more functional, friendly and easier to use.

Add Natural Light Photo: Solatube Light tube. One 10" light tube delivers as much daylight as a typical bathroom window. Open up the room to the outdoors and let the sunshine in. Add windows if possible, and replace small windows with larger ones. We seldom see a bay, bow or box window in a bathroom (unless we put it in), yet these are very effective not only in fostering the illusion of more space, but actually providing more space — a wonderful space, indeed, for humidity- and sunshine-loving plants.

Eliminate heavy window treatments. Curtains and shutters undo all the good effects of windows. If privacy is an issue, use obscured glass or even glass blocks. But leave as much of the view as you can. Long views are another way of making a small room seem larger (see below).

If more windows is not an option, consider adding a skylight. A skylight not only lets in daylight, but can be opened to increase ventilation. However, if the bathroom is on the first floor of a multi-story house, a skylight may not be practical. In such case consider a light tube.

Light tubes are small, very reflective tubular skylights that can be installed where traditional skylights do not fit. A 14" tube, can be up to 15' long (to reach even a 2-1/2 story roof) and can snake around obstructions. A tube delivers about as much full-spectrum sunlight as a 36" x 36" window — more than enough for a small bath.

Carefully Design Artificial Lighting Say good-bye to dark, room-shrinking shadows with well-placed and carefully designed artificial light. Even with natural light sources, a bathroom needs abundant artificial lighting. It is often most heavily used first thing in the morning and last thing at night when natural daylight is scarce in our part of the world. Bathrooms are often poorly lit with, at most, a central incandescent lamp and a vanity light of some sort — usually right overhead where it casts very harsh shadows.

The same general rules that govern the use of artificial light in kitchens (See: Designing Efficient and Effective Kitchen Lighting) apply to bathrooms. There needs to be a good source of overall (or ambient) light and bright, but not harsh, and shadowless lighting above each task area — vanity, tub, shower, and cosmetics table.

Architect and designer David Edrington prefers to light the lavatory area from the side. " I prefer a framed A well-lit bath With a skylight over the tub area, good vanity side lighting and accent lighting in the medicine cabinets, this bathroom has more than adequate light. mirror above a lavatory with sconces on the side", he writes, "because they give the best light to the sides of the face and fewer shadows in the facial recesses than light from above the face."

Reflective surfaces make a small bath seem larger Reflective surfaces help this very small bath seem much larger. For the most efficient lighting, fluorescent lamps should be used wherever possible. If fluorescents are not possible, then more efficient halogen or xenon lamps should be preferred to standard incandescent lights.

Use Reflective Surfaces Reflective surfaces increase light and create the illusion of more space. Matte finished and opaque surfaces may make a small bathroom seem suffocating.

The worst sin is an opaque shower curtain. We don't know where the notion came from that the bath tub must be enclosed in perpetual twilight — but we wish it would go away. An opaque shower curtain cuts three feet out of the room. In a 5' x 9' bathroom, that's 1/3rd of the space. There is certainly a need for privacy in the bath, but come on, just lock the door. Get rid of that heavy curtain. Replace it, hopefully, with a full-height clear glass shower door or, at least, a transparent curtain.

An abundance of glass together with lots of light are what makes a small room bigger. While you need to be cautious about enclosing the room in a sea of mirrors — which can be disorienting: carefully placed mirrors can greatly enhance the impression of roominess and multiply the effects existing lighting many times over.

Stay Away from Trends Stay away from trendy colors for durable items such as fixtures and cabinets. That au courant, gotta have "organdy rose" sink that all the interior decorators are raving about is going to be outdated within 5 years and join the legions of avocado and hot pink sinks we have removed and replaced merely because the color is so, well, awful. Put trendy colors, if you just must have them, in paint, wallpaper and accessories that can be easily changed when the color becomes dated — and it will become dated.

For fixtures, stick with white. White is just about everyone's first or second choice in fixture color, so it's hard to go wrong with white. White has been around for 150 years and has never been outdated. But if you just must have another color, stay with the lighter palette. Avoid black, dark anything, and whatever color is shown most frequently in the designer magazines.

Create a Unifying Design Theme with Strong Horizontal Lines Long Site Lines Strong horizontal lines, a light and monochromatic color scheme, and many reflrective surfaces make this tiny bathroom look much larger. A cohesive design theme that repeats color, texture, and materials will visually unify a bathroom and make it seem larger by subtly blurring the boundaries between major fixture centers. For instance, if counters, floors, shower and tub surrounds are made of the same material - such as ceramic or stone tile - your eye perceives the elements as one rather than as separate parts.

Your color palette should be light and monochromatic. Dark woodwork and cabinets close the room in. Light woods such as maple, hickory, alder or pine; or light paints make it appear larger. Abrupt changes in color from feature to feature stop the eye and break up the space visually. If there are to be color changes, they should be subtle, gradual and well blended. Using white in fixtures, tiles, flooring, and paint is a safe and sure design approach. Not only does it provide an expansive continuity to the room, but it also brightens the space and serves as a neutral backdrop for color accents in towels, vases, and bands of decorative tiles.

Strong Horizontal lines make the room larger, vertical lines make it smaller. Wainscot is very effective in visually enlarging a small room, as is a horizontal band of darker tile in a light tile wall. Pillars, columns and heavy vertical stripes in wallpaper are to be shunned at all costs. Photo: NKBA. Long Site Lines Good windows not only bring abundant light into the bath, but provide the long sitelines that make the bath seem larger.

Clear Sightlines and Borrowed Views Architect Sarah Susanka (whose book, The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live, has turned upside down the way many designers and builders think about housing) argues that well-designed and carefully appointed small, human-size rooms are preferable to the oversize galleries that make up too much of our new housing. But, she says, small rooms can be confining and cell-like unless they are designed to include long clear sight lines.

Clear sight lines are critical to creating the illusion of space. Get rid of the clutter on the floor and countertops. Stick the wastebasket in a corner, and store toiletries in cabinets and drawers — not on the counter top. A cluttered room just seems smaller. Allow nothing to interfere with clean and clear lines of sight.

Borrow long views, where possible, from other spaces or even from outdoors through a window so the room you are in seems larger because you can see far spaces outside the room. Even a small window makes any room seem less confining as well as adding natural light. But keep in mind that a good view into other rooms also generally means a good view into the bathroom from the other rooms. So there must be a balance between openness and privacy.




Need to know more about designing, planning and building a bathroom? Try these articles:
  • The Bathroom Revolution
    The role of the bathroom is changing rapidly. The importance of the bath in our homes has grown dramatically. Spacious rooms, closeted toilets, double bowl lavatories, whirlpool tubs, and recently large walk-in showers have found their way into our homes. No longer just a functional room, the bath is becoming a retreat. How can you modernize your bath into one of these gracious rooms? Find out here.


  • Cabinet Basics
    There's oak, maple, hickory, ash, cherry. Faced and unfaced. Framed and frameless. Custom, semi-custom and manufactured. MDF, Melamine, Thermofoil, even steel. So many choices. How do you pick the cabinets that are just right for you? Click here to find out.


  • Creating More Bathroom Space
    Our fondness of open spaces within the home doesn't end at the bathroom door. Unfortunately the acreage needed to create that spacious feeling just is not available in many older bathrooms. Often the key to updating a bath is creating more space — or at least the illusion of more space. This article examines where additional space can be found both outside and inside your existing bathroom.


  • Flooring Options for Kitchens and Baths
    Wood, stone, vinyl, ceramic tile, laminated flooring. What are the pros and cons of each? Learn the fundamentals of kitchen flooring.
  • The Japanese Toilet (Sidebar)
    If you are wondering who has the most advanced toilets in the world, well, it's not us. The Japanese beat us by a country mile.


  • Living Through Remodeling - A Survival Guide
    Remodeling will disrupt just about every routine you have; including some you are not aware of having. But this noisy, gritty process doesn't necessarily mean you will be tearing out your hair. With a little advance planning, it is possible to live through even major renovations with your sanity and good nature largely intact. Check out our remodeling survivors guide.


  • New and Traditional Countertop Choices
    Is solid surfacing, laminate, stone or tile your best choice of counter top? Or maybe something more exotic. Take a look at the incredible selection of modern counter top materials.


  • The Rules of Bathroom Design
    The Kitchen and Bath Association has published guidelines for designing a safe and functional bathroom. Created and maintained by a panel of expert designers, these recommendations should be closely followed in any kitchen plan.


  • Selecting Bath Fixtures: Sinks and Faucets
    The choices of bathroom fixtures are a little overwhelming. Tubs, showers, sinks, faucets and toilets come in so many shapes, sizes, colors and with such a great variety of features that choosing the right fixtures can be a challenge. Here are some guidelines and suggestions.


  • Selecting Bath Fixtures: Toilets
    The choices of bathroom fixtures are a little overwhelming. Tubs, showers, sinks, faucets and toilets come in so many shapes, sizes, colors and with such a great variety of features that choosing the right fixtures can be a challenge. Here are some guidelines and suggestions.


  • Sources of Supply: Faucets
    Thinking about buying a faucet? Before your do, see our list of major faucet manufacturers with ratings and guidelines on what to look for and how to select a good, lifetime faucet.


  • Taking the Crook Out of a Crooked Bathroom
    Among the major problems of this bathroom were that its walls were crooked, and looked it. See how we fixed this problem without rebuilding the walls, opened up the room visually and provided some unique storage in a small guest bathroom.