Even though we are living in an apartment now, we are lucky enough to have two bathrooms and no longer even have to share a bathroom with Mackenzie. Not that sharing a bathroom with an almost 4-year-old is really much of a problem, except that with the setup of this apartment, if we only had one bathroom we’d have to wake her up very early in the morning for Stefan to shower before work — and late at night if we wanted to use the toilet. Not so much fun.
But let me make no qualms about it — Mack definitely has the much bigger, cooler bathroom. Ours is functional but very small. But I do like the feel of it and how light and bright it stays. I could do without having dog fur on it all the time, but I have yet to figure out how to teach Ayla to turn on the vacuum…
This bathroom is actually so small that when the dog is laying on the floor like in the photo above (no, that’s not a floor rug), I have been known to hit my shin on the toilet, giving myself a nice bruise. And you think I’d learn about the space in there at some point, but apparently it may take a few years. 🙂
Since I’m already on a roll with the gripes, to be honest, our stand-up shower in this bathroom has also been a bit less than perfect lately. I don’t mind the small enclosure — it keeps the warmth in during the cold days of the winter. And with our super high ceilings, we need all the help we can get with staying warm. But when you have been in the shower for about a minute and just start rinsing the soap from your hair only to feel the water go from warm and wonderful to chillingly cold, you start to appreciate your shower a bit less. The owner of our apartment installed one of those instant water heaters that should be able to process enough water for at least one person to shower with plenty of warm water. But apparently it’s having trouble or something. I’ve never experienced electric showers for my bathroom until we moved to Germany, with most places instead having the tank water heaters instead. But I do like the reasoning behind these since they take up very little space and usually work great.
In fact, we’re not even totally sure if it’s the heater’s problem or rather the mixer on the shower that draws in the hot and cold water. Because the water will still get extremely hot and sometimes stay hot for the duration of your shower. But other days, it will stay warm for seconds and then keep giving you cold blasts. It’s almost as if someone has decided to put in some sort of evil contraption to keep us from running the water more than 30 seconds at a time. But something tells me that the sustainable living police haven’t been running around that vigilantly just yet. 🙂
Unfortunately, that’s not the only plumbing issue in the bathrooms here. Our shower which doesn’t like to stay warm also has to be lightly plunged every day to drain water from it properly (which again makes me think maybe I’m supposed to collect the water to water our plants outside…) And the toilets have to be unclogged every week or two for no particular reason other than regular usage. Thank goodness I knew about natural (and cheap) ways to unclog drains with baking soda & vinegar before we moved here or we’d be dumping way too many chemicals down the drain on a regular basis.
In other bathroom news, I’m thinking about changing the organizational operation of these shelves. If I could find another basket or two that filled up the shelf, I think I might be able to put the towels in the bottom of this shelf instead, which might free up more space for other things that end up laying out on the wall going around the room. I was previously thinking of having Stefan build me a shelf for the bottom, but the basket option just seems more practical as I think more about it.
How do you keep your bathroom space organized? Is it full of bins, baskets and boxes? Or do you just go for the “free for all” approach?
Want to complain about something in your bathroom? Have at it! 🙂
