A Simple Bathroom

When we moved, I packed everything from the two bathrooms into one giant plastic bin.  All that junk from underneath the two sinks, all the Stuff hidden behind the two mirrors, all the extra toiletries that somehow made their way out of the bathrooms — all of it.  I tossed it into a bin, moved it to the new apartment, and promptly forgot about it.

It was probably the best move I could’ve made.

As time wore on, I began pulling things from the bin and moving them into the new bathroom as I needed them.  Slowly, I stocked what I used every day, and nothing else.  What was left in the bin went to Freecycle or another room of the house.

As for the bathroom?  Why don’t we take a peek:

This is the shower.  That’s Mr. Savvy’s bottle of shampoo (he’s been working on it for about a year), my razor, and we share the soap.  There are no other toiletries in the shower — I use the soap as bodywash, facewash, and shampoo.  It’s wonderful, only having to pack one item when I travel.

Here’s the sink.  I’m pressed up against the window to get this shot, so you can get a feeling of how tiny the bathroom is.  As you can see, the vanity is just big enough for a bar of soap and Mr. Savvy’s razor.

We keep most of our junk behind the mirror.  There’s bandaids, combs, Mr. Savvy’s electric shavers.  The main things I use are the coconut oil on the middle shelf (for my hair and sometimes for my hands), the barely visible hair clip on the top shelf, and that peculiar jar on the bottom shelf.  That’s my deodorant — a 50/50 mixture of cornstarch and baking soda.  I stuffed a few cotton balls in the toe of a sock, and that’s how I apply it.  It works all right for now.

Here’s under the sink, where we keep the toilet paper, our travel toiletry bags, a hair-catcher for the drain, and in the back is the last of my feminine hygiene products — obsolete now that I’ve found my menstrual cup again, but I’ll use them up all the same.  To the right, you can see one of the two trash cans in the house — this small one, and there’s a bigger one in the kitchen.

Here’s a picture, taken by standing in the bathtub and leaning way back, of the toilet and the wall it’s on.  We hang our towels on two hooks just inside the door, and they do double duty as hand towels (although if guests come, I’ll change them out).  We don’t keep anything on the back of the toilet, which I think makes things a little less cluttered.  I bought that glass shelf from a salvage store nearby and hung it high to keep it out of the way.  It serves as decoration, but also as storage.

That blue vase?  A wedding present — and also cotton swab storage.  I used to keep the swabs in a jar, but then I had no place to display the vase.  Once I switched them out, the jar became a non-leaching container for leftovers, and now everyone can admire the vase without ever guessing it contains anything.

And last but not least, the basket.  It’s where we keep our soap, my favorite soap from Cardigan Mountain Soapworks, that serves double and triple duty all over the house.  I buy the big 40 oz. blocks, slice’em up and use them wherever we need a bar.  Sometimes I tuck one into the linen closet, to keep the sheets and towels smelling good.  More often than not, I pull the basket down and take a greedy whiff.  I love handmade soap.

Thanks for joining me on the official bathroom tour.  We’re certainly not minimalist, not yet, but we’ve simplified our bathroom routines to the point where we only need to keep the necessities in place.  How about you?

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©2010 at Simple Savvy, the simple living blog where I’ve loved that soap with a passion since I found it at a craft fair four years ago — and no one’s given me anything to say that.

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