How to plan bathroom storage

Most bathrooms run out of storage long before they run out of floor. The vanity gets all the attention, and then the towels end up on a hook, the spare rolls go under the sink, and the counter slowly disappears under everything that did not fit anywhere else.

The fix is usually not a bigger room. It is using the walls and the closet you already have, and deciding what goes where before anything is ordered. Here is the order we would plan it in.

1. List what actually lives in the room

Not what should live there. What does. Towels, spare paper, cleaning supplies, the hair dryer, the bottles that come in threes. Count the tall things separately, because tall bottles are what force a door where you wanted a drawer.

That list decides everything below. A bathroom planned around a list stays tidy. A bathroom planned around a photograph looks tidy in the photograph.

2. Use the wall beside the vanity

A tall storage cabinet next to the vanity, or standing between two sinks, takes the clutter off the counter without taking any more floor. Two of the bathrooms in our own gallery do exactly that. One runs cream glazed cabinetry into a corner with a tower standing between the two sinks. The other puts a tall cabinet between two undermount sinks, under a mosaic band that runs the length of the wall. In both, the tower is what lets the counter stay clear.

It can match the vanity exactly, and it should. One run of cabinetry reads as furniture. Three unrelated pieces read as a storage problem somebody tried to solve one purchase at a time.

3. Match the bathroom to the rest of the house

This is the part most people miss. Every cabinet line on our floor also builds vanities, so a bathroom can carry the same door and the same finish as your kitchen. That is how a house ends up looking related from room to room, instead of looking like every room was bought separately.

The cabinet lines that also build vanities include Crestwood, Designers Choice, Executive, Koch, Midland, Waypoint, Wolf, Wynnbrooke, Envii and Sollid. If you would rather have a standalone piece, we also carry makers whose whole business is vanities, such as Jeffrey Alexander, Kohler and Lacava.

4. Drawers where you reach every day, doors for the tall things

A door gives you one deep cave that you kneel down and dig into. A drawer brings the contents out to you, so you can see what you have, which is the whole reason a drawer bathroom stays tidy. Drawers cost more than doors, every time, so put them where your hands go every morning and keep a door for the tall bottles and the spare rolls.

Soft close on doors and drawers comes as standard on what we carry, so that is not a line you need to negotiate.

5. Do not forget the linen closet

If there is a linen closet in the hall, it is part of the bathroom's storage whether or not anybody planned it that way. Linen closets are usually tall and shallow, and deep fixed shelves waste them, because anything at the back stops existing. Shallow adjustable shelves do not.

We build closet systems measured to the opening you have, in the same finishes as our cabinets, and there are systems on the showroom floor you can load and pull before you decide.

6. Choose a finish that suits the room

The air here is dry, and real wood moves with humidity. On a painted five-piece door that movement can eventually show as a hairline at the joints. It is normal and not a defect, but if the idea bothers you, look at a slab door or a wrapped one instead.

We carry stained, painted, laminate and Duraform finishes. Laminate and Duraform wrap the door, which makes them the easy answer next to a sink. Stain shows the wood and hides everyday wear well. Paint gives you exactly the color you want and shows every knock at the edges.

7. Custom where the room is awkward

Bathrooms are old, and walls are not square. Semi-custom cabinetry is a catalogue of sizes and options that covers most rooms well and costs less. Full custom is built to your dimension, for the odd wall, the sloped ceiling or the gap no catalogue size fits. For most bathrooms the honest answer is semi-custom with one custom piece where the room fights you.

See it, then draw it

Storage is easier to judge with your hands than from a photograph. Open the drawers, stand in front of a tower, load a closet shelf. Our Littleton showroom holds the cabinet lines, the vanities, the countertops and the hardware in one place, so you can see the whole combination together.

Then we draw the room in 3D before you commit. That is the cheapest possible moment to discover that the tower you wanted stops the door from opening all the way.

You do not have to hand us the whole bathroom

Three ways to do this, and all three are normal here. Buy the cabinetry and install it yourself. Buy it and hand it to your own contractor. Or let us handle the whole bathroom from the first sketch to the last outlet cover. Same showroom and the same pricing either way.

We design and install across the southwest Denver metro, so Columbine, Englewood, Littleton, Lakewood and the rest of it are all a short drive from the Belleview showroom.

Related: Bathroom remodelingBrowse vanities