Bathroom Hacks: Without spending a fortune

I’ve moved home several times over the years and the message from the real estate agent is always simple: pay attention to the kitchen and bathroom.

These are unquestionably the most prized assets of a home and for the purposes of today’s write-up, I’ll be focusing on the latter.

Unfortunately, I don’t have huge sums of money to invest in my bathroom. I would love to turn to Villeroy & Boch for all my fittings, reposition everything (how do new-build developers get layouts so wrong?) and then add some beautiful flooring in for good measure.

As it turns out, my budget doesn’t permit the above.

Something that it does permit is smaller changes, and this will be the focus of today. Over the last few weeks I’ve made a few small alterations to my bathroom, and the effects are marvelous.

I’m going to start with the tiles. In an ideal world, I’d have new tiles. I don’t hate mine, but they are certainly not to my personal taste.

One of the big problems with them is that over the years the grout has started to discolor and they look almost unhealthy. As such, a couple of weekends ago I followed this guide; I removed all the grout and then re-applied. The transformation is immense; the room suddenly looks utterly clean and in optimum condition. In terms of high-impact changes, this is up there with the best.

Next, it was onto the fresh-factor. Something that I cannot stand in most bathrooms are synthetic air fresheners. I seem to be almost allergic to them (and I’m not a huge fan of many of the scents, anyway).

This is where I turned to fresh flowers from Avas Flowers. Avas Flowers have some excellent inspiration on their social pages (here is the Avas Flowers Pinterest page) and show some really creative ways to breathe freshness into your home.

I’ve now made it my aim to always keep a fresh bunch of flowers in my bathroom; not only is it great for odor purposes, but they also breathe a new sense of life and freshness into the room.

My other big win came courtesy of towels and bathmats. This was probably my biggest expense, but it again made the room feel like new again. There are some scary studies about the number of germs that work their way into these softer furnishings, so I decided to take action. My three-year-old set of towels and a bathmat was discarded, and new items were brought in. They are black (so contrast against the white tiles), which amplifies the effect.

All of the above were tiny to implement in the grand scheme of things, but the difference is substantial. Over the next few weeks I’ll be trying a few more quick bathroom hacks, and I’ll let you know the results in a future post.