Small bathroom layouts that actually work

Almost every small bathroom in an American house is one of three rectangles. The good news is that all three are solved problems — there is a right answer, it has been built ten million times, and fighting it is how people end up spending five thousand dollars moving a drain to gain four inches.

Three plans that work

The clearances you can't design around

These come from the plumbing code and from what it takes to actually use a room. Check your local code — it governs — but if a plan violates any of these, it is not a plan.

The one that catches people is the toilet. Thirty inches of total width means fifteen from the centerline of the drain to any wall or vanity on each side, and that centerline is set in concrete or hidden in a joist bay. Measure it before you fall in love with a wider vanity.

Tub or shower?

In a 5×7 or smaller, you are usually choosing. The honest version of the trade-off:

• Keep the tub if it's the only one in the house and you're in a family neighborhood. Buyers with small children filter listings on it, and a three-bedroom house with no bathtub is a harder sell than people expect.
• Take the shower if there's another tub elsewhere, or if the tub in question is a 1970s alcove unit nobody has bathed in since the Clinton administration. A full-width shower with a glass panel transforms how large a small bathroom reads.

The financial part is covered in what a bathroom remodel actually costs — short version, converting is $2,000 to $6,000 over a like-for-like tub swap, because the drain moves.

Six things that make a small bathroom feel bigger

1. Run the floor tile into the shower. One continuous floor with no threshold reads as one room instead of two small ones. The single most effective move on this list.
2. Clear glass, not framed or frosted. A frosted panel is a wall you can half see through. Clear glass with minimal hardware lets your eye reach the far wall, and the far wall is what makes a room feel big.
3. Tile to the ceiling. Stopping at 72 inches draws a horizontal line across the room at head height and caps it. Going up costs a few square feet.
4. A wall-hung or open-legged vanity. Seeing floor underneath the vanity is worth more than the storage you give up. If you need the storage, get it on the wall instead — a recessed medicine cabinet takes no floor at all.
5. Larger tile, fewer grout lines. The old advice was small tile in small rooms. It's backwards: a 12×24 on the floor of a 5×8 gives you a calm surface instead of a grid, and calm reads as spacious.
6. One big mirror. Wall to wall over the vanity, not a small cabinet centered over the sink. It's the cheapest square footage you'll ever buy.

What not to do

• Don't move the toilet to gain a few inches. Thousands of dollars, permits, a hole in the floor, and nobody who walks in will ever notice.
• Don't put a big pattern on every surface. In a small room, one thing gets to be interesting. Usually that's the shower wall, and the floor stays quiet underneath it.
• Don't buy a vanity before measuring the toilet centerline. The most common return in this whole business.
• Don't skip the exhaust fan. A small bathroom holds more moisture per square foot than a large one. It's a hundred dollars and it's the difference between grout that lasts and grout that grows things.