Bathroom design has come a long way since people used a bucket in the kitchen near the stove to bathe. Some early inventive pioneers were creative enough to come up with some innovative and brilliant decorative design ideas by converting an old closet into a makeshift bathing area where they hauled in an old tin tub to garner some form of privacy when taking a bath.

Small bathroom remodeling has gone from simply a room with a bath to extravagant interior concept ideas. Hollywood popularized the trend of designing your own bathroom by showing big-screen stars lounging in lavishly designed bathing areas surrounded by an elegant marble and other sumptuous bath accessories that the common public had never seen before and now wanted in droves. Modern washroom design was born as people realized they wanted all the same fashionable designer luxuries they had seen on TV and in the movies.

Custom Bathroom Strategies

When configuring a bathroom, today’s modern bath planners predominantly incorporate four main plumbing fixtures that the bathroom user can’t live without a toilet, vanity sink, bathtub, or shower enclosure into their bathroom blueprints with many variations in color, size, type, and finishes. Custom bathroom planning directions dictate that washrooms have become larger, more eco-friendly, and provide the homeowner with a near spa-like experience.

Fuelling this bath design trend, most homes now include a master bathroom. With an unlimited collection of interior customization ideas provided by the numerous bathroom fabrication manufactures in the industry, lavatory development has gone from drafting up a utilitarian boring room to creating a personalize bathroom layout to meet and fulfill the needs of just about any intuitive idea the homeowner may think up when engineering their bath.

What Are Your Priorities?

When embarking on a do-it-yourself job, put some thought into the planning and layout of your bathroom to avoid common pitfalls and design disasters. If you are building a bath, money, of course, is probably the one defining factor that will limit or allow you to create your bathroom as you please. The next most important factor that will influence the outcome of your upgrade is ultimately the fallacy of your working plans.

The accurate formation of a washroom blueprint allows you to discover your priorities and bath construction mistakes before you commit to any given course of direction. This, in turn, will give you the confidence and direction about how to proceed with your layout and construction.

Virtual Room Planner

Whether you are starting your lavatory from scratch or you just want to remodel an old out-dated bathroom, 3D design tools allow you to literally walk through your virtual bathroom before you construct it. Professional decorators will tell you that a virtual room design tool is the ultimate visualization instrument and the key to a successful renovation project. With bathroom planning software you get to quickly model different washroom schemes so you can choose the best fixture arrangement to create the ultimate spa bath.

Optimizing Your Space

Small bathroom design is of particular interest to the average homeowner who would like to enhance the limited space in their home. Some helpful space optimization ideas you can use when laying out a small bathroom include: incorporating large mirrors, good lighting, and smaller fixtures into your bathroom plans to help alleviate common spatial issues.

Create a Checklist

When creating a beautiful new bathroom, essentially, the best way to protect your home investment and save you a lot of headaches and regrets is to set up a comprehensive planning guide when you update your bath. This three-phase forecasting guide should include a project checklist of materials, scheduling (building construction and hiring contractors), and costs to help you design your bathroom.

Cost and Materials

Devise a bathroom with confidence! In the formation of the first phase of your bath project checklist, a good bathroom planner should include the materials to be used along with the cost and quantity of each when coming up with a construction proposal. A good outline should also include the cost of new faucets, vanity tops and covering walls, etc.

The showers and faucets installed in your bathroom also play a major role in your bathroom interior. For modern bathrooms, I recommend you to have a handheld showerhead that attach to tub faucet installed in your bathroom.

Major or Minor Alterations?

Moving on with your proposal, the second architectural phase examines possible major alterations to the arrangement of your bathrooms such as structural changes, new plumbing lines, and new fixtures like a tub or toilet to add an attractive addition to your bath. Spatial relations between your restroom’s intended elements such as height and width of plumbing fixtures should also be depicted at this stage when mapping out your bathroom.

Labour and Design Expenses

The third and last phase of your working checklist pulls all your organizational ideas together. Here you should have a pretty good mental picture of how long building your bathroom will take and have a better perspective on how much it will cost you to finish the proposed project. With this new insight, you will be able to determine how much of the remodeling work you can do yourself and what you have to contract out to compute your labor and design costs.

Equipment, Tools, and Supplies

To effectively finish your bathroom, your checklist should be very specific about the tools and supplies you will need. From paint to paintbrushes, everything must be framed out and included in the budget and must be on hand in ample supply when you begin your renovation project. This way your program can progress smoothly without interruptions or delays to produce the professional results you want.

A good bit of advice to follow is if you don’t have a piece of equipment that you need, write it down and include it in your overall cost. To illustrate this point further, don’t speculate when you remodel a bath, find out for sure and you won’t get any nasty surprises later on when you realize you have to rent something in order to finish the renovation.

Hire a Professional Contractor?

Don’t be a do-it-yourself hero wannabe. If you don’t know for sure, ask someone who does and if you don’t know about it, more than likely you should leave it to the professionals anyway to avoid a costly repair later on because of your inexperience if you are planning to tackle the project yourself.

A word of caution here for those trying to save a buck, you may not think you don’t have enough money to hire a professional but a bathroom compromised by poor design, construction and plumbing mistakes will cost you more to repair in the long run. Honestly think about it. If you have to do it twice, it will cost you twice as much of your hard-earned cash. If you have to, put aside your ego and make the call.

Check off Goals as You Achieve Them

Remember, when coming up with decorating and design ideas in your bathroom, you are not out to reinvent the wheel. Set out to accomplish your goals by following a design framework that allows you to plan and track the steps you need to fulfill your plan. Move forward and remodel your bathroom with confidence knowing you have come up with the best ideas to design the room.

Another great thing about a washroom design checklist is that as you shop around for information to get a “lay of the land” so to speak, you will be able to see the decorative possibilities that you never saw before.

Keep an Open Mind and Seize the Opportunity!

There are so many new bathroom design concepts and innovative products coming out for the bathroom every day that may actually change your “game plan” because now you can buy it cheaper or do it faster. For some, designing a bathroom is a life fulfilling a dream, for others, small bathroom design is just another home improvement upgrade in a long list of many.

Either way, don’t limit yourself to your previous misconceptions about “old school” bath designs but remain open to the potential your bathroom has to offer in creating an unforgettable space. Just remember to stay within your budget and maintain a general theme to articulate your vision and hold your design proposal together on the road to creating a beautiful new bathroom