I seem to have spent about a whole month thinking about bathrooms. We don’t have much space in the current project, but I’d been sent into William Wilson by my plumber to choose some wet wall for the bathroom in Ethel’s and saw this layout while I was in there, which I really liked – so I borrowed a tape measure off them and sent this picture plus measurements to our architect to see if we could do something similar.
As it turned out we didn’t have quite enough widthways because of the stairs, but using that as inspiration he came back with three different layout options, two with a bath, one without, but warning me that if I had a bath in there, it was going to be pretty tight to get a large enough electric water heater in under the stairs. We ended up marking out the bathroom dimensions on a site visit and what looks like quite a large space on graph paper actually isn’t when you’re standing in it.
So I mused on it and while I was musing I had a weekend away in Inverness with Mr J in a hotel room with the biggest bathroom I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. As in you went down a staircase inside the bedroom to get to it.
And yes, that bath was gorgeous and I soaked in it up to my chin in hot water, but it took about half an hour to fill and I did get a bit fed up waiting for it. (There was also a TV on the wall to the left and the loo was hidden round the corner behind the basins). We did love the shower, however, so as soon as we got home I called my business partner and suggested we went for the big walk-in shower option – it would save about £1,000 on not needing the hot water cylinder as well. He was up for that, so back it went to the architect to find out just how big we could make our shower tray.
We’ve ended up nicking a bit off the living room alcove, but we’re going for a 1500 x 800 shower tray with wetroom-style shower screens and a top of the range electric dual-headed shower. I think it’s going to look fabulous and as we’re pitching this as a romantic hideaway (hence the idea of having a double-ended bath in there in the first place) it’s big enough to get two people into it.
And that wet wall I was choosing that started all this off? That’s been installed, along with a new shower (all of it: tray, enclosure and mixer), new loo, new basin and the floor under the loo that had started to rot thanks to condensation running down the underside of the bowl has had the rotten bits removed and replaced with spare bits of flooring we had left over – I still have a whole unopened box of the stuff, so we’re okay for repairs for a while. It looks absolutely great and the first guests to use it haven’t reported any issues (they’ve been here 10 days now and there are four of them, so it’s had a good workout!)