Oh, bathrooms. Not my favorite rooms to work on, but definitely one of my favorites when they are finally complete. We were fortunate enough when we bought this current project house that there were two bathrooms in the house -- well, sort of.
The secondary bathroom had a toilet and a tub/shower combo, but no sink. I couldn't quite figure out why they had built a bathroom without a sink, but I think because it was formerly used as a rental and several individuals resided in the house, it probably seemed a necessary addition at some point in time. Still, not having a sink in a bathroom is one of those things that left me scratching my head.
So, when we were making our plans for renovations, we decided that we would lose the tub/shower combination and instead install a small, walk-in shower stall with a curtain so that we could add in a sink. The area for this bathroom is pretty cramped, and expanding the spot isn't a possibility (at least not without a ton of even more work and losing space in other room(s)), but we were pretty confident that we would be able to fit everything in to the spot.
As we got going on the renovation, Sam also had to take out some of the wall to the right (visible in the photo below) because the space just outside this room is for the laundry and the walkway between the wall for the bathroom and the wall for the laundry was only about 20 inches wide. How the former residents were able to get a washer and dryer through the opening is yet another question I'll always have, but we knew we had to fix this problem as well. Unfortunately, the "fix" was going to make this already small bathroom even smaller.
Sam went to work ripping out the shower combo and the toilet, as well as a fair amount of the drywall, while I was busy working on another project. My vision of this bathroom was that the small walk-in shower stall would be placed to the left of where Sam is standing in the photo above, to the rear of the room, the toilet would be where he was standing, and the sink would be at the front of the bathroom, to the left, just in front of the shower.
We searched high and low for a shower base that would be small enough to fit. We ended up with a quite small base that we thought would do the trick. The trouble became, however, that because the house is old and built on lava rock, moving the shower plumbing to the back was not going to be a possibility. This meant that the shower stall would have to remain at the front/left and the sink would be at the rear of the bathroom where I'd wanted the shower stall.
The problem with this layout is that it creates an awkward footprint, as well as making for a tight squeeze when going to wash hands. The sink would need to be very, very small, and I still had concerns about the space between the different pieces in the bathroom and moving around with any sort of ease.
So, we talked more about what we should do and I suggested that maybe we should stop trying to make this a room with a shower and just adapt it to a half bath. I realize it seems a bit insane to take away a full bath, but I reminded Sam that it was never really a full bath anyway (since it didn't have a sink), so in reality we'd just be making it more functional. The room is nowhere near bedrooms, so it doesn't really make sense to shower in it anyway, and the reality of its size and the limitations with plumbing means that it will always be awkward.
We asked for a bit of input from others, and ultimately decided that we had to make the shift to adapt this room into a half-bath instead of a three-quarter. A bit disappointing, but we figured it was better to make the decision now than to get farther along in the project and know that we had to make the changes anyway.
Behind the drywall (on the back two walls) was the original lapboard, so we decided we'd keep that as the base of those walls for this room and paint them (since they'd already been painted at some juncture in the past). We added tile to the floor, textured and painted a third wall, and added a brick look to the short forth wall. All the items we'd ordered for the bathroom had to be returned (sans the toilet), but that provided an opportunity to put in an appropriately sized sink vanity.
Although the room still isn't quite done, it can be used at this point, so we're pretty happy about that. We had to do some repair work to the tile we installed, which has been a bit of a pain. The floors in this house are completely un-level and it created a situation that needed attention after we'd done the work of installing the tile, but all seems to be remedied now.
We need to find a corner piece for storage in the empty back/left corner space, the new door needs to be put back on the hinges (it had to come off for some paint touch ups and to fix the tile issues), and the fan cover still needs to be installed, but we are very happy that things are getting wrapped up in this very small space that became quite a thorn in our sides.
Unfortunately, (again) due to the age of the house and the foundation difficulties, the lighting for this room has to remain on the wall opposite the sink/vanity, which is a little weird, we know; but, we are still pretty pleased with the way things have come out to this point... all just part of the fun of an old home.
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