Sharing Bathrooms in a Big Family

Sharing bathrooms in a big family can be tricky business. You’ve seen the movies! Here’s how we’re making it work for us.

view of vanity in large bathroom, with trashcan and scale on floor.

Want to save this post?

Enter your email below and get it sent straight to your inbox. Plus, I’ll send you time- and money-saving tips every week!

Sharing a bathroom is a good problem to have in a world where some still don’t have clean running water. Here’s our solution for sharing bathrooms in a big family.

When we first rented our last home, the one where we lived for 14 years, some of the property managers worried that the house was too small for our family.

It was a five-bedroom, four-bathroom home; we were two adults and six little kids. Many of the staff had grown up with their own bedrooms so they felt that we need a 7-bedroom home, I guess?

One of the women there acted as the voice of reason: she’d been the oldest of 12 in a much smaller house, so she knew we’d be fine.

And we were.

The girls had their own en suite bathroom as did Bryan and I. The boys shared the bath between their bedrooms. And there was a “guest bathroom” downstairs that the boys ended up adopting as their own in later years.

Two people (or less!) per bathroom worked out well for a long time.

(We will leave the discussion of messy siblings and kids’ cleaning standards out of this conversation.)

small downstairs bathroom with towels hanging and candle lit.

Last summer when we started our house hunt we wondered about the bathroom situation. Four-bathroom homes are thin on the ground in our price range, though we did see one that even had five!

We contemplated the idea of a two-bathroom home, but decided that three was a good target. Three would already be downsizing and two might be more than some people could bear.

Our new home has three bathrooms. With seven people. We made a good call.

Bryan and I have claimed one as our own because it’s actually in our room, but the five kids are sharing the other two.

While not the biggest of problems, it was one that needed troubleshooting from the start.

I realize that I’m veering into the territory of luxury “problems” with this topic, but it’s one that has real-life consequences for the five kids I have living at home. This is our real life, and hopefully our solution will inspire your own, however many bathrooms you have.

running water into a bubble bath in a white towel bathroom, there is a loofah and a scrub brush on the tile near the faucet, the sun is shining in.

We discussed different ways to divide the territory, the obvious one being girls and boys, but I really wanted all bathrooms to be available to anyone, including guests, especially since there aren’t as many as there once were. Since the college kids leave earlier in the morning, they’d be needing the bathrooms at the same time.

I thought back to my freshman year in college when the 50 girls in my hall all shared one bathroom (with about 8 toilets and 8 shower stalls).

We used buckets.

Not for potty, of course! But, to cart our belongings to and fro.

In your bucket went all your toiletries and items you’d need in the bathroom. When you needed to shower or brush your teeth, you took your bucket/tote/caddy with you and returned to your room with it when you were done.

(The weekly cleaners chucked what got left behind, so you made sure to take your stuff!)

I knew that system worked, and that it could work for us, too.

So, I gave the kids some choices of “buckets” and we ended up with these totes. They come in enough colors so that the color coding of our home continues.

These caddies have worked well. And since all three bathrooms are often in use at one time, I’m so glad to have sorted this situation.

Perks of this System:

Each kid has his or her own color, so I know whose is whose, especially if it gets left behind.
There are draining holes in the caddies and a soap dish on the top. (We’ve had issues when someone paid $$$ for a nice bar of soap and lost it to his siblings’ using it. Ahem.)
No necessary bathroom products are held hostage in a bathroom that is already in use. You won’t be held up by someone in the bathroom because you already have your stuff and can go to another bathroom.
It’s easier to clean the bathrooms because there isn’t a bunch of people’s stuff in the way.

While we haven’t tried this system in a one-bathroom home, I think it would likely help, especially if you have access to mirrors in the bedrooms or hallway.

Anyway, this is one thing that I’ve systemated this last year that makes me really happy!