So You Moved Into a Bigger Place and Now You Have a Guest Bathroom

By Nicole Cliffe July 21, 2011

Mazel tov! That’s wonderful. No more visitors looking through your meds.

Ways to ensure they don’t need your Klonopin in the first place?

Do not buy wicker, bamboo, or fabric-y wastebaskets and then fail to line them with a plastic garbage bag. That’s messed up. Metal is more forgivable, but, you know, is Martha Stewart going to come take you away if there’s a Duane Reade bag folded over the lip of your trashcan? Probably not.

Extra toilet paper (like, twelve rolls of extra toilet paper) lives under the sink. Everyone knows that. It’s not a fun treasure hunt. Don’t buy a goddamn ceramic frog from SkyMall to store your extra toilet paper. If I’ve had to skitter around your bathroom with my pants around my ankles, wondering if the extra toilet paper is in your laundry hamper, it’s going to stay with me.

You know what lives next to your extra toilet paper? A box of o.b. tampons. Applicator-free means you can get away with your brushed-copper, bagless wastebasket! (It doesn’t, but it makes it less likely I’m going to clog your plumbing.)

Do you have a plunger? Get a plunger. Have a thing for your plunger to sit in, so if it has to be…plunged into your toilet…there’s a surface it can return to other than your fluffy toilet-surrounding rug.

Do not own a fluffy toilet-surrounding rug.

Now we’re getting petty, but if you have a cute bar of soap, and it sits on a little wooden rack, and you only have people using your guest bathroom once a month, the cute bar of soap will dry out and adhere to the little wooden rack with the power of a thousand suns, and some poor unfortunate soul is going to snap said rack like a twig while straining to separate the two.

I’m not going to complain about your reading material. Anything is nice. Even just one of those shower curtains with Onion headlines you had in college.

Thank you for inviting me to your lovely home. I’m sure your own personal bathroom is an intuitive paradise for all your bathroom needs and wants. And Aveda cherry-almond bark conditioner.