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artemis78

Feedback on bathroom design

6 years ago
last modified: 6 years ago

We are in the early stages of planning for a bathroom addition and I would love any feedback on overall design from those who are more experienced in this! For context, this is a small house (1200 sf 2BR/1BA) and we are doing this within the existing footprint, so this is not going to have extensive storage space or a spacious shower, and clearances are going to be minimal. Because space is tight, though, we want to be smart about placement of each fixture.

This is my current thinking on design. The blue bathroom is the new bathroom; the black bathroom is mostly existing, except that currently the toilet is flush with the sink (leaving only a foot of clearance to the tub, which is not to code and pretty uncomfortable to use--hoping to take advantage of this project to push it back to have 24" of clearance). This is a 36" x 42" shower; I don't think we can get anything bigger in there without pushing further into the bedroom space. The current bathroom is 6'x8.5'; the new bathroom would be 4.5' x 8.5' and would have a pocket door (24" or bigger if we can fit it). We're a family of four (two adults, two school-aged children).


This is the space we're starting with. Big square is the existing master bedroom (12'x12') with a closet (3'x6') and office (9'x6') off of it. We would be taking down that wall and pushing the bedroom to the back of the house to add a new bathroom immediately opposite the existing bathroom, and to restructure the closet as a more traditional 24" deep space. (The doors on the right side of the image open to the second bedroom.) The top and bottom walls in the image are load-bearing; the other walls are not.


Any feedback, cautions, or suggestions would be welcome. (We will be looking for a design/build firm to work with so hope to get some more ideas there, but are hoping to have a pretty good sense of what the ask is before we start interviewing.) Thank you!

Comments (5)

  • 6 years ago

    This looks do-able to me. I have a shower 37.5" deep and 62" wide and would find your size to be comfortable. I do worry about the swing of the shower door, if you are not using a shower curtain. It needs to swing both in and out for safety. If someone has a medical emergency or falls, the door must open outward. Can you switch the toilet and the sink around in the new bath? That may give you what you need for the door.


    Measurements of all the walls, doors, and windows would help a lot in getting others to comment, too.


    I find myself wondering if there is room to put the new bath entry door on the wall to your hallway, around the corner from where you placed it. Two - no, three - advantages to that - one is that the light from opening the bathroom door will not shine in the eyes of the occupant who is trying to get an extra half hour of sleep while the other is getting ready. Second, the bedroom is small and can use all the space you can get. And third, you could possibly have the bathroom door open outward, into the hall, giving the small bathroom more space. I put in a pocket door in my small bathroom and having access to that wall behind the door makes it much roomier. oh, and the sounds of the bathroom will be more muffled if the door is not opening into the bedroom itself. Be sure to sound proof the wall to the bedroom and the hall. There is special soundproof drywall. Sounds echo and are loud in bathrooms. Get a solid door, too, not hollow core. I thought I had made clear we wanted all solid doors, but did not double check (and have known my contractor for years and do not get things in writing anymore - bad move). We have hollow doors and we hear everything room to room but the bathroom is the worst.


    Please add in the measurements of the new bedroom. It seems that it will be a hair over 12 ft wide and then 10 ft deep. A king bed can fit in that space. I think our bedroom was about that size. Master bedrooms should be able to hold a king bed for resale, I would think. We had a double decker drawer bed from Anderson Manufacturing when we lived there. Bed #2 in that link.


    What is the climate where you live? Many places you cannot have a shower head coming out of an outside wall because the pipes will freeze. If you ever get sub-zero weather, do not do that. Put the pipes in the wall with the other toilet, if you can. Then any running water noise will be in the other bathroom, not in the master bedroom wall.


    That is all I can think of at the moment. Add measurements and people will chime in more.

  • 6 years ago

    Thank you! Yes, I should have noted that the blue bathroom door would be a pocket door. Putting it on the long wall allows it to be wider, but we recently visited family with a 24" door and found it workable. Realistically if we put it on the short wall it may be open most of the time anyway, with the user just closing the bedroom door instead. I was worried about the shower swing--I think it just clears here but not sure how well that holds in real life. (Originally I tried a 36" shower keeping the room at 51" wide, but that did not have room for the door to clear.) The blue bathroom is 54" wide and 96" long. (The current bathroom is just a smidge longer so we feel good with that dimension, but not sure about the width. Trying to minimize the space taken from the bedroom while still making the space usable.)


    Fortunately we are in a temperate climate, so no freezing temps and some of the existing pipes are on the outside wall, though we could certainly move them. (Our city requires us to replace our sewer lines with a project of this scale, so there's an opportunity to revisit placement and sizing there too.)


    The new bedroom in the plan above is 9.25' x 13'25' (not including the closet). I've also played around with completely moving the closet and putting it against the new bathroom wall to keep a more square room, which would look something like this (with closet doors opening to bedroom--not shown here). That's a queen bed but a king would fit. This design does create a long corridor to get into the room, but the room itself might be more workable, and is almost as big as the current bedroom, which is nice.



  • PRO
    6 years ago

    I have one comment. If I am understanding the redesign, you plan on moving the existing toilet back a foot. Usually the stack for the toilet (runs vertically up for venting and down for waste directly behind the toilet) is very difficult to relocate and will cost a lot to accomplish. I don't know if you thought about this or whether this matters to you.

  • 6 years ago

    Thanks--oddly our stack is on the exterior of our house (next to the window in the current bathroom in the image--I think perhaps the toilet once faced the door?) so I think this won't make too much difference one way or the other, but am also expecting we may have to replace it to get a second toilet in anyway. That was one reason I had to the two toilets close to one another, but it may not be necessary to do that. This is one of the details I'm hoping we can hash out once we have a design build firm on board, though--it's a 105-year-old house, so there are lots of quirky things about the plumbing (and everything else!) I have a feeling we may find some additional problems with the existing bathroom (which was remodeled somewhat poorly by the PO without permits) so am mentally prepared to renovate that one too if it will improve the overall project.

  • 6 years ago

    Another option, though it goes down a rabbit hole of approaching a whole house remodel, is to address the clearance in the existing bathroom by moving the tub, rather than the toilet, back a foot. This would take the foot from the closet in the kids' bedroom, which is 3' deep so could go to 2' deep and still be usable. So that might be a possibility too. The bathtub that's there now is functional but cheap and not level, so I wouldn't be sad if we had a good reason to replace it!