No Room for Another Towel Bar? Use the Back of the Door

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The towel bar is already occupied, but another damp towel still needs somewhere to go. It gets draped over the shower rail, hung from a hook that is really too small for it, or folded over a towel that has not dried yet.

Finding another place for a bar sounds simple until you look around a small bathroom. The wall beside the shower is too narrow. The space above the toilet is awkward. The remaining patch of wall may be exactly where the door swings.

An over-the-door towel rack moves the problem onto the door instead. This one has three staggered bars, so several towels can hang behind the door without another set of holes in the wall.

The staggered position matters once the towels are wet. Rather than three bars sitting directly above one another against the door, they project different distances into the room. That gives the hanging towels some separation instead of pressing all that damp fabric into the same narrow space. Three-tier over-door racks are commonly designed specifically to give towels separate hanging space for drying.

There are also two small hooks at the sides. They are more useful for a washcloth, bath sponge or another light bathroom item than for squeezing yet another bath towel onto the rack.

The Door Still Has to Work

The bathroom door is easy to overlook while thinking about the towels. Once a rack hangs from the top and projects from the back, the door still needs to close properly and open without the rack hitting the wall.

That is worth checking before turning the back of the door into towel space. Over-the-door racks solve the lack of wall space precisely because they use an area that normally goes unused, but the available clearance varies from one bathroom to another.

With three towels on separate bars, the original towel bar no longer has to hold them two deep. The shower rail can also go back to holding the shower curtain rather than whichever towel lost the argument for wall space.

If that curtain has a habit of moving inward once the shower starts, keeping a shower curtain from blowing inward deals with that separate annoyance.

The bathroom has not gained another wall. The towels have simply stopped competing for the little bit of wall it already had.