Living the Small Life: Storage (Part 1)

Welcome to my first of what I expect to be very many “small living” posts on the blog!

One of the defining features of our life in DC is the fact that we purposefully chose to live small. Now, when I say small, I do not mean NYC-live-in-a-closet small. But it is a small-ish property. Our dream home is about 900 sq.ft. and we often have to get creative with how we live here, especially given that we share the space with a toddler and a rather large dog. One of the key aspects of small living is learning how to squeeze every square inch into efficient storage.

Which is where today’s post comes in. I wanted to share with you what we did in our second bathroom to maximize our storage there. When we first moved in, this bathroom had a small shelf above the toilet, which was pretty but not exactly efficient:

So, on my quick to-do list was upgrading this space into some more useful storage! I wanted this storage space to be:

• Affordable (so no custom cabinetry)

• Shallow (so that we can still comfortably use the toilet without banging our heads)

• Closed (so that we can stuff the cabinet with all the not-so-sightly toiletries)

• Wall-to-wall (if possible)

And a thorough search on the Internet yielded very VERY few options for us. In fact, the only thing that seemed to have potential for us was IKEA’s LILLÅNGEN wall cabinet. But instead of one, we opted to stack four of them together! Thankfully, this cabinet has the option to open the door in whichever direction you want so we were able to have the doors open as if it is one large cabinet!

These cabinets hold a TON! All of our towels live here, as well as all of our medicines (I know, I know, it’s not ideal to keep them there but this bathroom is ventilated very well), all of Robert’s grooming things, plus our extra shower gels and shampoos as well as a bunch of our toilet paper (not bragging on the amount of tp we have here… we just had a ton of tp before the pandemic began because I never learned how to pause our subscription on Amazon :D).

So, if you have some unused space above your toilet, I would highly recommend these cabinets! For less than $200 and a weekend afternoon, we added a ton of much-needed storage without compromising the aesthetic of the bathroom :). I am also happy to report that we have had zero run-ins with the cabinet, which means the depth of it is perfect!

Last but not least, we truly tried our best to align them as close as possible to each other. This is as good as it got, haha. Thankfully, we have come to love the imperfections that come from doing things yourself ;).