5 Bathroom Remodeling Tips to Make Your Bathroom Seem Larger

Enlarging a bathroom is a fantastic way to modernize your home, and bring in some of the hottest trends in home remodeling today. However, that kind of bathroom remodeling takes the price up into the highest level, and it may not be feasible in your home, either because it isn’t appropriate for the overall value of the home, or there may be physical constraints that would make expanding the room too complicated, or just not reasonable. If that’s the case, here are our best tips for making the room appear larger, without actually increasing its size.

1 – Brighten with Lighting

Brightening up a small bathroom will make it feel larger. Recessed lighting is preferable because it doesn’t take up space in the room, and gives it a modern feeling. Installing recessed lighting over the shower or tub has the additional benefit of helping you to wake up in the morning, in addition to making it easier to shave or attend to other detailed grooming.
A skylight will add light and make the bathroom feel more open. If the bathroom doesn’t have any place to put a skylight, you might consider enlarging windows. Frosted glass is a good alternative to having to cover the window with a curtain, since it will give you some privacy but also let the light in.

2 – Make the Most of Storage

One of the tricks to bathroom remodeling when you want to make the room look bigger is working out how to increase storage, without taking up a lot of space. By increasing storage, you can put more things in a proper place and eliminate clutter on counter surfaces. Open spaces and unbroken lines go a long way to increasing the feeling of the size of the bathroom. Try shallow shelves on the wall; you won’t be able to store towels there, but you can get a lot of decorative items and toiletries on them without sacrificing a lot of the room. Your remodeling contractor may even be able to build in storage in the shower.

3 – Use a Consistent Color

Another little trick to making the bathroom look larger is to have your remodeling contractor paint the ceiling to match the walls. You definitely don’t want to have a darker ceiling, because that almost always makes it feel lower, which makes the room feel tighter. White ceilings are very normal, but can create a break in the visual flow all along the top edge of the room. The advantage of painting the ceiling to match the walls is that it eliminates the break and lets the eye flow from walls to ceiling and back down.

4 – Add Large Mirrors and a Medicine Cabinet

If the medicine cabinet can be recessed into the wall, you will not only increase storage, but create a smooth surface, contributing to the sleek look of modern bathroom designs. But even if it can’t be recessed, a medicine cabinet will provide shelves for storing many small items that would otherwise be cluttering up the countertops, which, as discussed above, makes the room look smaller.
Large mirrors are the best way to make small rooms look and feel bigger. If the mirror behind the sink goes all the way to the ceiling, it will make the ceiling look higher. And of course, reflecting the majority of the room doubles its perceived size! Another way to make the most of a large mirror is to have your remodeling contractor install sconce lighting with the mirror, in such a way as to have the light reflect from the mirror back into the room so that it creates even more lighting.

5 – Select Flooring for a Sense of Spaciousness

Our eyes naturally follow lines, which is why the earlier tips about the ceiling color and removing clutter work so well. To use this design principle in bathroom remodeling, tile the floor so that tiles line up along the longer length of the room, and don’t cut across it between the closest walls. Of course, this only works if you have rectangular tiles. Square or geometric tiles will look the same regardless of which wall you align them to.
When the goal is to look larger, go with large sized tiles. The grout lines in small tiles will create a lot of lines, which will break up the floor and attract the eye. Another way to minimize the effect of the lines is to use a grout that matches, or is similar to, the tile color.

If you would like to get more home remodeling tips or find out what you can do to make your home more comfortable or efficient, give us a call at 623-544-1211. TWD has certified design professionals on staff, and we are always ready to answer your questions.