New Bath Plans

In the area of the dark side, I'm going to be creating a new bathroom.  I did talk about this idea about a year ago and I've made some changes based on the feedback I was given.

Below is a floor plan of the entire downstairs of the house.

The area in question has been highlighted in yellow.  I'm taking 2-1/2 feet from the dining room and 2-1/2 feet from the kitchen to carve out this modest, full bathroom.

Below are the plans showing the prospective bathroom.

The bathroom is accessed from the hallway at the top of the basement stairs.  I've slightly enlarged this area into what I call the bathroom foyer.  The blue indicates the placement of the hidden window.  This is immediately below a window in the upstairs hallway and will help bring some much needed light into the end of the hallway.

In the previous plan, the bathroom door was off the dining room which several people took issue with.  I didn't love the idea myself and you all picked right up on it.  Moving the door to the hallway, required giving up a new closet.  We'll also take extra measures to soundproof the wall between the dining room and the bathroom.

Above is a closeup of the bathroom itself.  The tub extends into the kitchen space by 30 inches and will require a new support structure overhead.  In fact, there's quite a bit of structural work that will be done as part of this project.  New joists will be added under the bathroom area and a few posts are being added into the basement to correct and support some sagging.

The bathroom has no window unfortunately but the window that's covered up will be right outside so I'm considering taking out the panels in the door and adding some Florentine glass to obscure any view.  But, I don't know, it's just a thought right now.  Plenty of bathrooms don't have windows.  

Here is the elevation of the bathroom.  It's nothing fancy by any means but I hope to choose fixtures and materials that will give it a vintage-with-a-twist look. 

 Since the upstairs bath is off of the master bedroom, I thought it was important to get a tub in this bath downstairs for any guests that might want to tolerate staying with me.

Another purpose of creating this new bath in the middle of the house is to a create a much better kitchen.

As you can see by the floorplan of the kitchen, it's lined with windows and doors which make it hard to create a decent span of countertop. 

By creating a new bathroom in the center of the house, I'll be able to demo the PANTRY and BATH and expand the kitchen to the entire back wall of the kitchen.  The new tub takes up 2-1/2 feet by 5-1/2 of the old kitchen but removing the pantry and old bathroom  adds 4 feet by 12 feet to the new kitchen.  If my math is correct that's a net gain of about 32 square feet of kitchen

Here's a photo of that back kitchen wall.  The sliding doors go in the bathroom on the right and the pantry on the left. 

Here's the plan for the future kitchen.  When I showed the Sketchup Model of the kitchen last year, some of you freaked out on me.  I hope you have a little more trust in me at this stage of the game.  The floor plan is more for placement of appliances.

The blue, again, is a new window that will go in the kitchen.  I've gone back and forth between having only one window so the sink is centered on the window and this two-window plan so the windows are symmetrical on both sides of the room.  If I slide the sink down, I feel it's just too close to the fridge.  I'd rather have the extra light.

Notice the little square outside the new kitchen window?

That's this chimney.  It's gotta go.

This project will do all of the structural work for the new bathroom and isolate the space that will become the bathroom.  This will allow me to finish the dining room so you can see all four walls.  Okay, Randy?