Oh Look - A Bathroom

It's all beginning to take shape and the bathroom looks really good. Here are some pictures which begins to give you some idea of the size and layout. Now I can see all the furniture in the room I am delighted with how much space there is. It really does make the house look fantastic.

The holes in the wall are where the shower unit controls will go.

Squeezing past the sink

One of the problems with trying to plan a bathroom or a kitchen is that you have to make decisions that cannot be easily revoked. Once the pipework is in etc the scope for change is limited.

It seems to me that this situation is worse with a bathroom as you are usually tying to squeeze three or four pieces of furniture of different shapes and sizes into a small a space as possible. With a kitchen you are trying to squeeze as much stuff as you can into the space you have. Kitchens have the other advantage of using equipment and furniture of a standard size; 600mm deep and so on.

As a result of all of this I think it is nigh on impossible to pick a bathroom suite and be certain that you have enough space between the wall and the sink to get to the toilet or the bath and the toilet to get to the sink and so on. Templates etc would work well but it is not like the real thing. That is why I ordered a sink and toilet today so we can see how it fits in the bathroom. If it works - great. If not we will use this kit in the downstairs cloakroom and buy something smaller for upstairs. It means paying more than one delivery charge (£40.00 each time) but I think it is worth it. It costs a lot more to send these things back if they don't fit and you don't want them anymore.

Bathroom Suites

I have been told that it is time to start thinking about the bathroom suites we want (and buy them I guess). The type of toilet is particularly important as it makes a difference to the way that the soil pipes are attached.

I have looked at various bathroom suites on-line and have been quite surprised and how much they cost (a lot) and how much they get discounted to (also a lot).

So, here are links to the proposed suites.

Upstairs Bathroom

Downstairs Cloakroom

Thermostatic Shower Mixer tap

This all comes to about £550.00 with the taps costing £255.00. I have sent details of these over to our plumber for his thoughts but I am going to make life size templates of the units and take them round over the weekend to see how it all fits and to find out if you can get past the sink to the toilet and so on. We have decided (on advice) to move the sink and the toilet around upstairs which should make this easier. Apparently the stud walls are up so I will take some pictures at the same time.

Kitchens and Cloakrooms

Here are my two initial plans for the kitchen. One still incorporating a downstairs cloakroom and one not.

Irrespective of what building control have to say I quite like the idea of an extra toilet and, as the room space without it would be long and thin, I think it works quite well. There will obviously be a sink in the cloakroom but my copy of Visio didn’t have one small enough. The washing machine is in the corner of the toilet. I have seen this done before and it seems a good use of space and a I don't think people object to the principle of a washing machine (with a tumble drier above if required) in the cloakroom.

The cupboards on the left of the kitchen are wall level units on the floor with a cut back worktop on top. I have seen this done before and it also works quite well.

With a cloakroom



Without




The windows are in different places as I am expecting to move them around a bit to make the kitchen fit.

As before any comments (especially critical ones) are very welcome.