If you live in a small house, or an old house like we do with small rooms, this one’s for you! Here are some of my favourite tricks for how to organize a tiny bathroom vanity!
We’ve been working on a little update for our main bathroom over the last little while, in between installing the new shiplap in the kitchen, the new vinyl plank flooring, and starting on building the new front porch. If you follow along with me on Instagram, you may have seen that we replaced our old pedestal sink with a new teeny tiny vanity. I thought today I would share a few tips for how I organize a tiny bathroom vanity, since I just finished up getting ours fully set up, and I’m pretty thrilled with how well it’s working out for us.
How I Organize a Tiny Bathroom Vanity
I wouldn’t necessarily say that we live in a small house, but it’s 120 years old so a lot of the room sizes are proportionally “off” according to modern standards. Like many old house, it was added on to over the years, so we have all different shapes and sizes of rooms here and there. This bathroom is just off the kitchen, so it functions as our “main” bathroom, even though it’s so tiny compared to the bathroom in our master bedroom. We used to have a pedestal sink in this room that provided absolutely no storage, but that had a huge sink on top, so it actually took up a lot of space in the room. Our goal with switching that out was to gain at least a little bit of closed storage in this room, while regaining a bit of a sense of space in there. So we went for just about the tiniest bathroom vanity we could find. It was pretty plain, so I’ll be talking more about how we made it a little more attractive in a future post. Keep an eye out for that!
We actually got rid of a cabinet that we had on the wall that I thought was taking up a lot of visual space in the room, so my goal for this bathroom vanity was to be able to take all of the kids’ things that had previously been in that wall cabinet and in baskets around the room, and move them to the vanity in a way that was a lot less cluttered.
Oh, and I wanted to mostly use things I already had. Not too much to ask, right?
How to Organize a Tiny Bathroom Vanity: Use Every Surface
Although a tiny vanity may seem like it doesn’t have much storage potential, once you really start to look at all the possibilities, square inch by square inch, you’ll really start to see how much space a tiny vanity has to offer. The first, most obvious space to use is the inside of the door, or doors. I have to admit that I aaaaalmost ordered this set of organizers from Amazon, because they’re just so clever, but I found I was able to get a huge amount of usefulness out of the inside of the door by just using these command hooks to hang a few specific items.
If you have a tiny bathroom vanity, you may actually find that you’re able to fit all of your stuff in it without much of a challenge, but that it doesn’t feel very functional, and may be frustrating to use on a daily basis, which is what we experienced when we first installed this vanity. Things would be hard to see at the back, and we’d knock bottles over as we were reaching for something else, so using organizers to spread things out and give them their own spot ended up working really well for us.
It’s also important to note that the inside of a vanity also has walls and (depending on your sink style) sometimes a ceiling that you can work with to organize your stuff. I was more than ready to snap up those Amazon organizers for the inside walls if push came to shove, but I just really didn’t need them. I also really love the idea of using magnetic strips for things like hair pins on spaces like this.
How to Organize a Tiny Bathroom Vanity: Create Levels
Another super simple thing you can do to make your vanity feel a little more useable is to add a riser to the back half of the cabinet. This makes it easier to access everything in the back and makes it easier to see too. You can order cabinet risers from Amazon or you can use this as a great opportunity to use up some scrap wood! We just used what we had to create a little bit of height in the back, then I painted the whole thing white so it would kind of disappear inside the cabinet.
What Types of Organizers Work Best in a Tiny Bathroom Vanity?
In an ideal world, I’d love it if everyone could get all of their organizational needs met by using things they already have, recycled items, or things found in a thrift store. If you do find that you need/want to buy something new and specific to organize your vanity, I love these clear acrylic organizers.
You can find them in so many shapes and sizes now and they’re relatively inexpensive for the organizing power that they provide. The fact they they’re clear just makes everything so much easier to see when you have a million little things inside your tiny vanity.
What I really love about these acrylic organizers is that they allow you to fill in the gaps in your organizational scheme with recycled glass containers while still maintaining your super-organized, streamlined look!
In my vanity, I used a riser organizer pretty similar to this one, along with a few other other flat organizers that I already had, similar to this one, and also this one. Once I had those in place, I was able to go to my cupboard where I’ve been saving all of the empty candle jars and stuff like that and grab a few to use in there as well. I love that everything looks basically the same, so I have a beautifully-organized cupboard, but a large part of the whole thing is actually recycled! Yay!
Do you have a tiny bathroom vanity that needs organizing? What solutions have you found that have worked really well for you?
I’ve also shared some photos of our much larger master bathroom, along with some styling ideas over at Kitchen Bath Collection! You can read the article I wrote for them here: Five Easy Styling Tricks for a Magazine-Worthy Bathroom.
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.