Nine Things You Can Change in a Rented Bathroom and Take With You

A rented bathroom is the room people give up on first. It is small, it is ugly in a way that was decided by someone else in about 2004, and every instinct you have about fixing it involves a drill and a deposit. So it stays exactly as it is for four years, which is a long time to dislike a room you stand in twice a day.

The constraint is real, and I am not going to pretend around it: you cannot retile, you cannot move a fixture, you probably cannot paint, and anything you screw into a wall is a conversation later. But the constraint is narrower than it feels. What a landlord objects to is a permanent change to their property. Almost everything that makes a bathroom feel different is not permanent, and a surprising amount of it is not even attached.

First, work out which mistake you are actually looking at

Rented bathrooms fail in three distinct ways and they want different answers, so name yours before you buy anything.

Some are badly lit — the room is fine and the light is doing you harm. Some are visually noisy, where four different tiles, a patterned floor and a beige suite are all shouting different decades at once. And some are simply overloaded: not ugly, just carrying eleven bottles, three towels and a bin on a surface the size of a book. Most rented bathrooms have two of the three. Very few have all of them, though it certainly feels that way at seven in the morning.

The free ones, tonight

1. Change the bulb. Warm white, 2700K to 3000K, with a color rendering index of 90 or better printed on the box. A rented bathroom is very often badly lit rather than ugly, and the light was chosen by a landlord optimizing for nothing. This costs the price of a bulb and it goes in your pocket when you leave.

2. Take everything off every surface. All of it, out of the room, then put back only what is used daily. The number is usually four or five things. A bathroom looks expensive in direct proportion to how little is sitting out in it, and this is the only design move that is both instant and free.

3. Raise the shower curtain. If there is a curtain on a tension rod, move the rod as close to the ceiling as it will go and buy a longer curtain. The eye reads the top of the curtain as the top of the room. A rod at six feet in an eight-foot room is voluntarily giving away two feet of height, and lifting it is the single most effective thing on this list.

The ones that cost something small

4. One large mirror, leaning or hung on what is already there. Rented bathrooms usually have a small mirror screwed above the sink, and you often cannot move it. You can, however, put a bigger one somewhere else — leaning on a shelf, hung on an existing hook or picture rail, propped on the toilet tank if the room allows. Depth is the thing a small bathroom is short of, and a mirror is the only object that manufactures it.

5. A ladder or over-the-toilet shelf that stands on the floor. No screws, no anchors, no conversation. This is where the towels and the four surviving bottles go. Freestanding storage is the entire storage strategy of a rented bathroom, and the best thing about it is that it leaves with you.

6. Cover the floor. A washable bath mat, a cotton rug, a run of interlocking wood or vinyl tiles laid loose over the existing floor. The floor is frequently the ugliest surface in a rented bathroom and it is also the one nobody thinks to change, because it does not occur to people that a floor can be temporary. Check the room dries out properly underneath whatever you put down, and lift it when it does not.

7. Textiles in one color. Towels, mat, curtain, all agreeing. This sounds trivial and it is the most reliable trick in the article for a visually noisy room: when the soft things all match, the eye stops counting the hard things. Three matching towels will do more for a bathroom with four competing tiles than any amount of styling.

The ones worth asking about

8. Peel-and-stick anything, with a caveat. Removable wallpaper and vinyl tile stickers work, and they work best on flat, dry, well-prepared surfaces — which is not most of a bathroom. Steam is the enemy, edges lift first, and “removable” assumes the surface underneath is sound. Away from the shower and the backsplash, on a wall that gets no direct water, they are a genuinely good idea. Directly around a tub, they are a repair job waiting for the end of the lease. Test one piece, in a corner, and leave it a month before committing.

9. Ask about paint. More landlords say yes than tenants expect, particularly when you offer to return it to white. It is one email, it costs nothing to send, and a painted bathroom is a different room. This is the one item on the list that requires permission, which is exactly why it is worth the ask.

What I would not spend money on

Sink skirts and toilet tank covers, which look like a solution to an ugly fixture and read as a costume on one. Anything adhesive across a wet wall. Storage that sticks to tile with suction, which fails at three in the morning and takes the shampoo with it. And a full set of matching accessories — the toothbrush holder, the soap dish, the tray — which buys the appearance of care in a room where the actual problem is that too much is out on the surfaces to begin with.

The reason this list is ordered the way it is: everything above the paint question comes off the wall and goes in a box. So the money goes into things you keep, in a room you are only borrowing, which is a better deal than a permanent improvement to a property that is not yours.

So change the bulb tonight, clear every surface, and lift the curtain rod as high as it goes. Three moves, one evening, nothing drilled. If the room still bothers you after that, you now know it is the room and not the lighting, and you can spend the next fifty dollars knowing what it is for.