This is a post designed to be exported to a new blog that I would like to create for the builder who is currently redoing our bathroom.
I have taken loads of before and after pictures, I hope I will be able to document everything. It will have a slightly off-mark point of view as it's meant to be for his portfolio. We'll see how it goes from there..
Location: south-west London, terrace house
Description of job : to redo entire ensuite bathroom, in tiny space, in current loft conversion
Plan of existing loft conversion :
The client wanted the part of the wall hiding the shower to be knocked down, replaced by a glass fixed panel, and the door replaced by a glass sliding door. Both glass panel and sliding door are being 'modesty frosted', ie frosted to hide most of a human body, but kept clear at the bottom and the top in order to keep a visual continuity on floor and ceiling, and increase the feeling of space to the entire bedroom.
SPACE
Gaining space in the shower was important too, as the actual cubicle was reduced to the minimum size and the owner felt very cramped in it.
To gain depth in this space, this is what the owner and his designer worked out :
1. Reduce the plasterboard wall to glass, much thinner.
2. Turn the whole enclosure into a wetroom, so no partition inside.
3. Chose special coating for inside walls instead of tiles.
4. Install a rooflight above the toilet, to gain head space, hence move the toilet back a little bit into the recessed roof storage space.
PLUMBING
The toilet unit was linked to a macerator in good working order. Quite puzzling as the pipes coming out and running outside were very small. It so happens that this particular kind of macerator does work with narrow pipes, but should be angled very carefully. The shower and basin waste waters were connected to the macerator, and became partly blocked 6 months after the owners moving in. But not the toilet.
The plan became to do a direct plumbing outlet for shower and basin on one hand, and increase the diameter of the macerator pipe.
The actual pipe was running along the staircase in a plasterboard box against the wall, and a bigger box would be built instead, containing both pipes.
To do the wetroom, the solution was a Wedi Fundo board. It was decided to use a Wedi Fundo board with a linear drain in the middle, and an additional piece of Wedi board was added at the toilet end because the Fundo was not quite long enough.
A BIT OF REDESIGNING
Above the staircase, where there is something undecipherable written, is where a cabinet 'over the stairs' is situated. A tank must have been stored there sometime in the past, it's just that size cabinet, with a huge amount of pipe and taps everywhere, half of them not going anywhere. It just looked like it had been patched up and added on over the years.
The owners are storing empty lugagge in this cabinet, but the only way to access it is from the stairs, and they are both not very tall, so ladder had to be bought in order to fit at a peculiar angle each time a piece of lugagge had to be used. It was decided to open the wall inside the bedroom, and fit a cabinet door that would open vertically, to gain easier access to this cabinet.
