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| WHOA, UGLY |
Here we go with some pics of our small, very small full bathroom upstairs before I began the demo. The room measures a staggering 5'X8' and in that space was crammed a bath tub, toilet and corner sink barely big enough to wash your hands in. I remember my father doing this room over and installing the grey fixtures so I am thinking it must have been around 1980 or so, which explains the color. It was in desperate need of a total gut down to the studs as there was only sheetrock and some sort of panelling in the shower area. Needless to say there was a lot of water penetration confirmed by mold, wet sheetrock and water staining on the framing. Having decided to take it down to the studs this offered me the opportunity to redesign the whole space and change the layout. The biggest change was that I did away with the tub and put in a stand alone shower and at the time this was our only full bath. Usually you don't want to eliminate a bathtub for fear of hurting the resale value of the home but I had been thinking ahead. I was fairly certain at that time I would be adding on the the house with another bedroom and bath, which is exactly what has been done. Anyway now I have a walk in shower, toilet and full size sink all in that small space and within proper building codes.
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| VERY VERY BASIC-CHECK OUT THE LIGHT |
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| DEMO |
One other major design change was the natural lighting. In the picture here you can see a small casement window located on right exactly where I wanted to put the sink and medicine cabinet. By removing it this gave me the much needed wall space however with any habitable room code says you need a source of natural light. Can you say skylight. That is exactly what I did, install a skylight with a little help from my roofer friend Bill. It was a Velux brand which I bought at Lowe's and is manually able to be vented. If I did it over I would have gotten the one with the electric opener as I had to buy a special pole to reach the darn thing when I want to open it. Note the old green cast iron drain pipe in the corner. All new plumbing was needed. Below are links to Velux brand windows and a good skylight install.
SKYLIGHT INSTALLATION VIDEO Very basic but identical to my installation.
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| ROUGH-IN |
I wound up having to do some reframing of the interior wall that had the tub on it. A couple of the old studs actually started rot from all the water penetration plus the whole wall was out of plumb. It was easier to reframe it than try to repair and modify what was there. One thing I have learned is sometimes it is easier, cheaper and faster to start from scratch. You can see some of the electrical and plumbing rough-ins, the shower will be along the back wall. Again this was a total gut so I have installed all new plumbing and electrical. The old drain pipes were cast iron which were replaced with PVC and I installed all new copper supply lines. I also pulled out some scary looking electrical wires which probably dated back to the 40's.
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| SKYLIGHT OPENING |
Here you can see some more electrical in the form of a recessed can light. Since there will be insulation covering the housing in the attic it needs to be rated as such. This would be the one you need. RECESSED LIGHT HOUSING I chose to go with the 4 inch as I like the more modern look of the smaller light. Just behind the light housing you can see the framed opening for the skylight tunnel and on the back wall the new PVC drain pipe.
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| FRAMED SHOWER ENCLOSURE |
Since the room is so small I did all the rough in work first then as you can see here I framed the wall which will enclose the shower. It is small in width but the code minimum of 30 inches and about 48 inches long. Remember that new drain pipe on the back wall, well that actually projects out into the footprint of the room so I could not run the shower the full 5 feet in width. There is some dead space to the right of the shower so I framed out a little niche which you can see better in the finished photos in the next post. In this photo you can also see I have removed the wall from the hallway leading into the bathroom. That will get reframed as well to accommodate a pocket door.
