Bathrooms and laundry rooms are notoriously cramped. Here's how to make the most out of the space you have.

Few bathrooms have enough places to hang towels. Stacking towel bars behind closed doors is a great way to remedy the shortage and use space efficiently.

Make space for supplies over the bathroom door so that they'll be accessible when they need to be replenished without cluttering under-the-sink cabinets.

Laundry rooms are typically tiny -- install shelves and a curtain above the washing machine to keep laundry supplies tidy and hidden from sight.

Stack towels for drying hand-washables on one shelf. Keep special stain remedies together in a galvanized metal box, and store mothballs and cedar chips in canning jars.

Unlike a drying rack, which takes up valuable space and holds a few shirts at most, a bath-towel holder mounted on the underside of a laundry room shelf makes a good spot for a row of shirts on hangers.

Maximize usable space in a tiny medicine cabinet by making use of magnets.

Even the smallest laundry room is easy to work in if it's organized. Small nooks and crannies can become useful spaces. Here, a four-inch-wide shelf holds bars of castile soap, laundry soap for delicates, a small sewing kit, sponge, and spray bottle of water for ironing. Decant powder detergents and other supplies into narrow containers to fit on the shelf.

No room for a bathroom cabinet? Install a hotel-style multitiered rack on the wall next to the tub to hold bath towels and washcloths.

Uniform plastic bottles not only look better than the usual shampoo and soap containers, but they also fit more neatly in the hanging wire baskets found in shower areas -- without taking up space on the bathtub rim.

Fit central cabinets with roll-out wire trays, the kind used in kitchens, then fasten a pair of hooks to the inside of the doors to hold bulky tools like a hair dryer or curling iron. If floor space is scarce, add a second sliding track in an adjacent cabinet to hold the trash can.

Rather than fight tight spaces with awkward angles, use them to incorporate additional storage. In this example, we built one cabinet into the wall beneath the roof eaves and another into a crawl space to the left of the sink.