At 45 square feet, this Hamilton high-rise bathroom had the dimensions of a large closet — and it was functioning like one. The original builder layout wasted floor area with a full-depth vanity that blocked the door swing, a standard floor-mount toilet that visually chopped the room in half, and a swing door that stole almost eight square feet of usable space every time it opened. Storage was a single mirror-front medicine cabinet barely deep enough for a toothbrush.

The homeowners wanted a bathroom that felt modern, open, and organized — without the luxury of adding square footage in a concrete-and-steel condo structure. We redesigned the room around three space-saving moves: a wall-hung toilet that frees up visible floor area, a floating vanity with integrated drawer storage, and a pocket door that returns those eight square feet to the room. Every material and fixture was chosen to make the space feel larger than its footprint.

Condo renovations come with a layer of logistics that houses don't. We submitted plans to the building's property management weeks in advance, booked freight elevator time slots for every material delivery, and scheduled all high-noise work — demo, concrete anchoring, tile cutting — within the building's permitted hours of 9 AM to 5 PM weekdays. Dust containment barriers went up on day one and stayed up until final clean, because in a shared hallway building there's zero tolerance for construction debris outside the unit.

Inside the bathroom, the structural steel carrier for the wall-hung toilet was anchored directly into the concrete block behind the drywall, distributing load across four points to handle well beyond the rated capacity. The pocket door required framing a new split-stud wall and routing the sliding hardware into the cavity between the bathroom and the adjacent hallway closet — a modification that took careful measuring to avoid the existing electrical run. Walls were finished in white large-format rectified porcelain tile (24×48 inches) with minimal grout lines, laid in a vertical stack pattern that draws the eye upward and reduces the visual clutter that small tile formats create in tight rooms. The floating vanity — wall-mounted at 34 inches with two soft-close drawers — sits above the continuous floor tile, which runs uninterrupted beneath it to reinforce the sense of openness.

The transformation is dramatic for a room that didn't gain a single square foot. The wall-hung toilet and continuous floor tile create an unbroken sight line from the door to the back wall, making the room read significantly larger than 45 square feet. The recessed cabinet — built into the stud cavity beside the shower — holds towels, toiletries, and cleaning supplies that previously sat on the vanity top or on a freestanding shelf. The pocket door alone changed the way the homeowners move through the space, and the matte black fixtures against white large-format tile give the room the clean, urban character that fits the building. From elevator booking to final inspection, the project was completed within the condo board's approved timeline — no complaints from neighbours, no hallway dust, no surprises.