"When my husband and I bought a 100-year-old house a decade ago, we knew home renovations were in our future. Over the years, we added a three-season porch, remodeled the kitchen, and finished the basement, along with other smaller home improvement projects. Each one has been well worth it, but there are always things you’d do differently once you actually spend your days living in the space. Now that I’ve lived with our most recent project—a DIY small bathroom renovation—I have some lessons learned through the process. Here’s what I still love after living in it and what I’d do differently if redoing our primary bathroom again.
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Deciding to Take on a DIY Small Bathroom Renovation
Our primary bathroom was fine and functional, but the pedestal sink wasn’t meeting our family’s needs for storage or counter space. Not to mention the wall’s paint was peeling off, the drain from the 100-year-old bathtub was always clogged, and mold was growing on the ceiling.
The bathroom needed more than a new paint job and I began saving small bathroom ideas and inspiration on Pinterest and Instagram. But because we remodeled our kitchen the previous year, this small bathroom renovation also needed to be budget-friendly. Instead of working with a designer, my husband and I decided to do as much as possible on our own to keep costs down, with the help of a contractor for the plumbing, tile, and electrical work.
Small Bathroom Remodel: What I’d Do Again
Install Heated Floors
I live in Michigan, and winters are long and cold. Having a heated tile floor not only keeps our feet comfortable, but it heats up the whole bathroom. We keep our floor thermostat set to about 80 degrees all winter.
Add Extra Storage
Storage is key in any bathroom. But a small bathroom requires some more creative storage. For ours, I wanted to utilize any space we could, so we had our contractor build a storage closet between the wall studs. It’s essentially like a giant medicine cabinet, and we could not imagine the bathroom without it. I also added a large basket from West Elm beneath the vanity, which houses our towels, hairdryer, and extra toilet paper.
Invest in a Bidet Toilet
This was a must-have for my husband. He’d experienced a Toto bidet at an Airbnb on a guys’ trip and wouldn’t stop talking about it. And, honestly, over a year into our DIY small bathroom renovation, it’s changed our life. Without getting too detailed, it is a clean I now feel spoiled by. Our bidet has a heated seat and multiple spraying (and drying!) customizations. Plus, if you need a nighttime bathroom visit, the toilet automatically opens and turns on a nightlight. Truly worth every penny.
Add a Privacy Wall
Bathrooms are a high-traffic area in any house, but when you have young kids, the whole family often ends up in the space. I’ve had many conversations with my kids after they enter unannounced when I’m going to the bathroom. Which is why I wanted to make sure our toilet had some privacy as part of our DIY bathroom renovation. By building a half-wall between the toilet and the shower, the shower still gets light from the window, but the person on the toilet still has some privacy from nosy little visitors.
Tile the Ceiling Above the Shower
Again, our house is 100 years old, and back then it wasn’t code to require a bathroom fan as long as you had a window. But living in Michigan means the weather dictates whether we would open the window for every bath or shower. So mold grew on our ceiling that we’d have to constantly clean.
When redoing our shower, our contractor asked if we wanted tile on the ceiling. I said yes, absolutely, and am so happy I did. For the cost of a few more square feet of tile, the shower looks more finished and eliminated the mold issue (and we did install a ceiling fan, too).
Customize a Standard Vanity
I spent time in a design studio trying to fit the small bathroom space with the storage and style. However, I couldn’t quite get exactly what I envisioned, so I delayed on approving the $2000 cost for a custom vanity. My delay was kismet because I then visited a friend’s condo with a recently remodeled bathroom and loved her vanity. “It’s from Home Depot,” she told me matter-of-factly.
So I started shopping online at Home Depot and quickly found the perfect bathroom vanity that matched my vision, with a few customizations. It came with a marble top, and I wanted quartz (less maintenance). And it had brushed chrome hardware—I wanted polished nickel. But it was easy enough to buy a separate vanity top and hardware for far less than a custom vanity from a design studio. Plus, I sold the marble top on Facebook Marketplace and recouped some of the cost.
Small Bathroom Remodel: What I Regret
Not Understanding How Hard Demo Would Be
In order to stick to our bathroom renovation budget and still get some of our must-haves (i.e., the bidet), my husband committed to doing the demo by himself. He got a dumpster, donned goggles, gloves, and a mask, and grabbed a mallet. It was going to save us about $4000, so doing the demolition seemed well worth the manual labor… until a few things happened.
First, it turned out demoing an original 100-year-old bathtub was an intense workout, and the force of it put a hole through the adjoining bedroom. Second, after pulling up the floor tile, he uncovered ANOTHER layer of tile cemented to the floor. The original bathroom tile would not budge with the tools we had, so we still had to pay our contractor to cut it out using a professional tool. Third, my husband punctured his hand with an old nail, which meant a call to the doctor and checking on his most recent tetanus shot.
Did doing the demo ourselves still save us a few thousand dollars? Yes. Would we do it again? Depends, but probably not.
Not Researching Bathroom Fixtures Before Purchasing Online
Because I was working directly with a contractor, not a designer, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. One of these lessons learned through my DIY small bathroom renovation was that different bathroom fixture brands have their own unique valves. I’d fallen in love and purchased a Kohler sink and shower fixtures, but my contractor had installed a Delta valve. By the time we figured it out, the shower had been tiled, and there was no way to make the switch. I still kept my Kohler sink fixture, but I had to compromise on a Delta shower fixture, which wasn’t quite a match in style and finish. I thought it would drive me nuts, but after living with it for a year, it doesn’t bother me (much) anymore.
Which leads me to another tip when remodeling a bathroom. Go see the fixture finishes in person at a showroom. For our bathroom, Delta polished nickel appeared almost gold, while Kohler was more chrome with warm undertones. When doing a DIY renovation, you really need to shop in person when you can.
Small Bathroom Ideas and Trends
Overall, though, I think the biggest “regret” from my DIY small bathroom renovation is that I wasn’t more creative. I went with fairly standard tile and neutral paint colors. While living in what I hope is our forever home, I wanted the en suite bathroom to seamlessly match our bedroom and flow with the rest of the house. But because bathrooms are smaller, they feel like a lower risk for making a bold creative choice, and I could’ve been a little less boring.
If you’re looking to remodel or renovate a small bathroom in the future, here is a peek into ideas, inspirations, and bathroom trends I’ve saved if I did it all over again:
Colorful Bathroom Tile
Pretty Bathroom Wallpaper
Statement Bathroom Lights and Mirrors
Vintage Artwork and Rugs
After living with our DIY small bathroom renovation for over a year, part of me wishes I had chosen a different wall color, experimented with wallpaper, or done more creative tile work. But, for now, I’m trying to be content with my one piece of colorful artwork and patterned bath rugs and towels. Every room is a work in progress, after all!
Kathy Sisson, Senior Editor
As a mom of two, Kathy is passionately committed to sharing the honest, helpful—and often humorous—stories of motherhood, as she navigates her own everyday adventures of work, marriage, and parenting. She honed her creative and strategic skills at advertising agencies in Detroit and Chicago, before pivoting from marketing to editorial. Now instead of telling brand stories, she’s sharing her own, with articles published across popular parenting sites—including hundreds of stories on The Everymom.