Non-permanent Bathroom Ideas for Your Rental Property: Make It a Home!

For useful tips on how to make your rental property feel like home, check out our guide on non-permanent rental property bathroom ideas.

Plain white walls and a shower that’s less than inspiring can make you feel trapped when renting a home. There’s nothing worse than when your bathroom in your rental property doesn’t meet your aesthetic dreams but you can’t facilitate the complete bathroom renovation you want. However, there are lots of bathroom ideas for rental properties that are easy to do and completely reversible when it’s time to move out!

Rental property bathroom ideas

1. Cleaning

Before you go on to make drastic changes to your bathroom, maybe consider giving it a deep-clean from top to bottom. It sounds obvious, but you should never underestimate how a proper clean can leave your bathroom feeling brand new. When we say deep clean, this isn’t just in reference to the usual spray down of your counters.

We’re talking about everything from descaling your shower enclosure door, to cleaning the grout on your bathroom tiles! If you’re now looking at your bathroom tiles and wondering if they’ve ever been cleaned, check out our step by step tutorial on how to clean bathroom tiles properly.

2. Paint

When it comes to painting a room in any rental property, we would always recommend clearing this with your landlord first. But, if boring vanilla walls are ruining your bathroom goals and you’re in need of a splash of colour, painting could be a great bathroom update. With this upgrade, less is definitely more, and so maybe just painting an accent wall would be the best option for a rental property bathroom. Even if your bathroom wall is tiled, tile paint works wonders to freshen things up!

3. Storage

The type of storage you use for all of your bathroom accessories, lotions and potions, can be a surprisingly easy way to upgrade your bathroom. Depending on how much free-reign your landlord is willing to give you, bathroom cabinets and storage units can be as invasive or discrete as you need them to be.

From freestanding cabinets that are placed on your bathroom floor, to wall hung cabinets that are installed into your wall. They’re great for storing towels and any other type of bathroom accessory. So if your mismatched bottles and serums that are currently strewn across your bathroom are ruining the potential for a chic bathroom look, storage cabinets are a great bathroom idea for rental properties.

4. Shelves

Similar to bathroom cabinets and storage units, shelves added to your bathroom can be a great temporary addition to your home. The right shelves can easily be made rental property friendly. Open shelving is a popular concept, especially for those who have matching accessories or products.

Ladder shelves are also a great choice for non-permanent bathroom updates. They can be leant up against any wall and are great for adding depth and dimension to a bathroom.

5. Plugs and wastes

Updating bathroom fixings like plugs and wastes are a great non-permanent bathroom upgrade that is often overlooked. Let’s say you’re going for a brushed brass theme in your bathroom. If you’re decked out with a brushed brass towel rail and toilet brush holder, wouldn’t it be great if you could have the plug and wastes to match?

From plugs and wastes to flush plates, this is a great temporary change to make to a rental property. Just be sure to hold on to the original plugs and wastes so that they can be reinstalled when it's time to move out.

6. Accessories

Speaking of accessories, this is another great bathroom idea for rental properties. It’s easy to settle for mismatched towel rails and caddies, but if you can’t make any full scale bathroom renovations, coordinating accessories to curate your desired aesthetic could be the next best thing.

Use bathroom accessories like towel rails and toilet roll holders, as well as shower curtains and bathmats to implement a theme within your bathroom. Themes such as a marble aesthetic, industrial style, or even a rustic theme can all be successfully implemented through your accessories.

7. A new mirror

If you want to completely change the feeling of your bathroom, a new bathroom mirror is a great way to go about this. Bathroom mirrors have made some great advancements in the tech world which can really make a rental property feel like your own hi-tech, smart home.

Bluetooth mirrors have some great features, such as being able to stream music or podcasts by connecting wirelessly to your phone. You can even get a demister mirror to completely eradicate any annoying condensation. Hi-tech mirrors also have some great aesthetic qualities too. Having a back lit mirror, or a LED mirror with changing colours can certainly elevate the aesthetic of your bathroom without you having to make any permanent changes.

And don’t worry, for those of you who would rather keep the daunting world of tech out of your bathroom, there is still a wide selection of elegant, tech free options - such as round bathroom mirrors - that will be sure to heighten the vibrancy of any space.

8. Plants

Real or fake, plants are probably one of the most obvious rental property bathroom ideas that won’t require any permanent changes. But popping a single fake potted house plant on the corner of your vanity isn’t exactly world breaking in the realm of bathroom updates. So, if you’re gonna entertain the plant aesthetic, why not fully commit?

Vertical gardens are incredibly popular and an easy way to incorporate lots of greenery without it being too invasive. Try out some shelves and wall pots that can house plants that thrive in humid settings. And for a spa feeling, try tying a eucalyptus plant in your shower which releases a relaxing oil and radiant smell every time you shower or bathe!

9. Tile Stickers

In certain cases, you can accessorise all you want but it still might fall short of your aesthetic goals. This might be because some serious changes need to be made to the tiles in your bathroom but your landlord isn’t fond of the idea of you painting them. If this is the case, there are still rental property friendly ways of tackling this.

Tile stickers and decorative panels are a great way to get the bathroom design that you like without the changes being permanent. Tile stickers can be cut to size and smoothed on top of your current bathroom tiles and are also easy to remove. This is a great idea for rental properties because they cause no damage to your tiles and some brands assure no remaining glue residue will be there once the sticker is removed.

For a more indepth look into how you can update tiles without removing them, check out how to update kitchen tiles. These useful tricks and guides will work great on bathroom tiles too!

10. Contact paper for counters

For those who like continuity, if you’re thinking about utilising stick on tiles but feel like your bathroom counter or vanity needs updating too, contact paper is a useful hack. Similar to tile stickers, contact paper can be cut to size and pasted over your bathroom counter if it doesn’t meet your aesthetic demands.

11. Change your showerhead

This might seem like a random choice, but swapping out your current showerhead for a new one is one of the most subtle but effective bathroom ideas for rental properties. There is such a variety of showerheads available, and whether you want to update your shower head for visual reasons or for practical ones, the choice is yours.

For those on a health kick, showerheads with vitamins and minerals in the water pipe can upgrade your shower experience to the next level. For all the people out there who willingly embrace the world of tech in their home environment, there are even shower heads with LED light options to create your ideal ambiance when showering.

12. Lighting

We’ve already established that lighting can have a drastic impact on the ambience of your bathroom. Well changing the light fixture, or even just the bulb is another one of those rental property ideas that isn’t too hard to achieve. There is a great variety of lighting you can add to your bathroom without it being too invasive, like strip lights or colour changing LED bulbs.

Having read through this list of rental property bathroom ideas, hopefully you’ve been inspired to try out some easy hacks to make your space feel more like a home! For more style tips and easy tricks to upgrade your bathroom feel free to check out the Victorian Plumbing Blog.