Staying cool in a bathroom is usually not much of a problem, but staying warm certainly is. In order to be comfortable in a bathroom, you need to be warm, in part because you spend so much of your time in there without clothes on. This is a challenge because the principal material in a bathroom is tile, whether stone or ceramic, neither of which is a material known for its inherent warmth. In fact, ice cubes exude about as much chilliness as these surfaces do. To make these surfaces comfortable to the touch in colder months requires some thinking that goes beyond the basic heating system, whether you use a boiler with hot water heat or a furnace to produce forced hot air.

If it was possible to heat the bathroom separately from the rest of the house, this would make a lot of sense in terms of your overall comfort. That’s because the bathroom is such a radically different space from any other part of your home. But though you can’t change the laws of physics regarding the heating of materials that simply don’t want to retain heat, you can work with your existing heating systems to create something much better. Let me walk you through some of the steps of how it can be done.

If you have forced hot air, the challenge is perhaps the greatest of all. Hot air rises, as we all know, and when it’s piped into the bathroom, it wants to rise instantly to the ceiling rather than hang around toward the cold tile floor where you’re standing. The goal with forced air heat, then, is to bring the heat in low so that the vent is either directly in the floor or fairly close to it. This will help warm some of the surfaces the hot air hits along the way, such as the floor, and even the bathtub or shower, if the vent is positioned well. Some of the nicest heat installations I’ve seen, in fact, include heat registers that are near the toilet. The heated air actually warms the porcelain of the toilet, which makes sitting down a much less shocking experience. Repositioning the registers in this way is easy to do during a whole-bathroom makeover. It can also be done, however, during a simpler renovation that may involve just a small amount of retiring or wall repair.

If your home has a boiler, you most likely have hot water heat, which also has some drawbacks in terms of heating a bathroom. Still, this can be reconfigured with an eye, or, I should say, a foot, toward maximum comfort. Many older houses and apartments with hot water heat contain bathrooms with old-fashioned cast-iron radiators. The problem with big radiators, however, is that they are slow to heat up, and take up a ton of space in the bathroom. This can be a problem especially in a small bathroom, where you’re literally fighting for every square inch. Instead, it makes sense when remodeling to remove these big radiators and retrofit a hot water baseboard heater in the bathroom, which is much smaller and more streamlined. And it won’t cost you anything in terms of comfort, either, because it will still offer the same amount of heating capacity, or even more. One caution: If you live in an apartment building, make sure you get management approval before proceeding.

Don’t settle for just any baseboard heat, however. With hot water heat, you typically have two choices when it comes to baseboard heaters. One type is called a fin-tube element, which is essentially a 3/4-inch hot water copper pipe decorated with small metal fins, then wrapped in a steel enclosure. The fins cause the hot water pipe to “lose” heat into the room. For anyone who has studied prehistoric creatures with their children, as I have, this is the same principle that governs the way the plates on the

Stegosaurus are believed to have radiated heat to keep the animal cool and absorbed heat to keep it warm. When the heating element is turned on, the room heats up quickly, but it cools down just as quickly when the heat clicks off, because nothing stores the heat at all. The dinosaur angle is an apt one when it comes to metal fin tubes, because you can do much better than this fossil in the bathroom, and the answer lies in cast iron.

Clunky as they are, one of the advantages of the old cast-iron radiators is that even though they do take a little bit of time to heat up, once they are warmed up and the boiler shut down, they stay warm for a long time afterward. If you’re frying bacon in a cast-iron pan, you know the pan stays hot long after you’ve turned the flame off. In radiators, cast iron offers this same advantage. You don’t have to add old-fashioned heaters in your bathroom, however. Instead, you can add smaller baseboard versions of these, which contain cast-iron elements that literally become a reservoir of heat. These baseboard heaters can be painted to blend into the room, and the only way you would know they’re there is because of the even temperature within the room.

Although cast-iron baseboard heat makes a great solution for keeping a bathroom comfortable, it does come at a small cost. Metal fin tubes would probably cost you between $6 to $10 a running foot, but cast-iron baseboards will probably cost you $25 to $35 per foot. If you were outfitting the entire house in cast-iron baseboard heaters you might balk at the price difference, but keep in mind the small scale of most bathrooms. At the most, the cost difference for a 4-foot section of a baseboard radiator would be about $100. It’s a great little extra, and one that you’ll remember every time you step into the bathroom on a cold morning.

It’s small details such as these that make a huge difference in the way a bathroom works, without breaking the budget.