Forget Refurbishing Your Bathroom - Here are 3 Ways to Rejuvenate It

Remodelling a bathroom is time-consuming and expensive. People often do it just because they feel the room has “been like that for too long.”

Well, there are ways to change that without breaking the bank. You can breathe new life into your bathroom experience with a few cost-effective changes, including upcycling old items to add some chic to an old room!

1. Freshen Up Your Shower with a Hard Water Filter

Let’s start with a common complaint with old showers — the water feels… old. This is partly psychological, but the more likely explanation is that you’re showering with hard water, and that will make your skin and hair feel old because it’s actually damaging them. If you live in an area with hard water, no amount of remodelling is going to affect your mains supply. It’ll still make your skin itch and your hair feel brittle.
But there’s a much simpler solution that doesn’t require you to get the builders in. Just install a hard water filter. This filters harmful chemicals out and softens the water, making it less damaging to your skin and hair. Hard water isn’t just unpleasant to drink — it’s actually bad for your hair and skin. Hard water contains chloramine, which is a combination of ammonia and chlorine. You don’t want much to do with either of these chemicals and certainly not when you’re showering. Chlorine strips natural oils from your skin and hair, which can dull their appearance and cause permanent damage if repeatedly exposed. You’ll leave each shower feeling much more refreshed, as well — it’s the difference between taking a dip in a mountain spring and a public swimming pool!

2. Turn Old Kitchen Racks into Shower Shelves

Throughout our lives, we acquire numerous kitchen items that have no origin story and appear not to function properly without another part (which we don’t have). Metal racks are a major culprit. A friend of mine currently has a rack that he’s sure used to fit in an oven tray for roasting meat. But he owns 4 oven trays and it doesn’t fit any of them. His solution? Turn it into a shower rack. Suction cups are incredibly useful for turning unused items into shelving — he stuck a few onto the kitchen rack and hey presto! He had a new shower shelf.

The great thing about this is that whether the rack is flat or curved, it works just fine. If it’s curved, use it like a wine rack — lay bottles of shampoo down across it. If it’s flat, you can stand the bottles upright. Whether you live in shared accommodation or you have a growing family, that cluster of bottles around the shower taps doesn’t spark joy. Reorganizing can really refresh a room, so any (non-sharp) metal rack is a great addition!

3. Re-Use Fancy Bottles for Toiletries

I got this one from another friend who frequently dyes her hair in different colors. She’d accumulated a bunch of spare hair bleach sachets and kept finding them lying around in her drawers. Her solution was so cute. She took this tiny, fancy little Chambord bottle (black raspberry liqueur, used for cocktails) and carefully funnelled the contents of the sachets into the bottle. Her hair bleach store now looks like a magic potion! The trick is to save fancy glass bottles whenever you have them (make sure to thoroughly sanitize them first). You can do it for anything — shampoo, shower gel, as long as it pours relatively easily. It can also be used for dry items like medication, although you should make sure these are clearly marked. Of course, it doesn’t eliminate the problem of buying the stuff in a plastic bottle (unless you’re homemaking your shampoo), but it looks amazing and transforms your aged bathroom into a delightful little apothecary!

Your bathroom may feel old, but age is only a feeling. A little bit of love and attention and some creative repurposing can completely change how you feel about your bathroom. Give these tips a try and let me know how you get on!