Now Slav has completed the demolition of the main floor bathroom, it is time to talk about the rebuild. We have been designing this bathroom since September, and have a pretty good understanding how we want the room to function and feel.
Let us start with the function. This bathroom is the only other bathroom in the house besides our master bath, and also the only bathroom on the main floor. We use this bathroom while working from home during the daytime, and when we hang out in the living/kitchen area in the evenings. Now we have set up a sleeping area in the adjacent office, this bathroom will also be used by guests.
For perspective, this picture was taken when standing in the living room. The room on the left is my office/guest bedroom, and room with blue walls and tiled floor is the bathroom.
We have decided to install the office door between the hallway and living room, which means that when the door is closed, our guests can have their own private suite and do not have to walk into the view of the living room to travel between bathroom and the bed.
Since we do not shower in the main floor bathroom, we’ve decided to install a walk-in shower without a tub. A walk-in shower is much safer for our eldly parents, and also easier to keep clean. Below is the old bathroom layout, with shower/tub next to the window, and the vanity and toilet on the right side of the bathroom.
And below is an inspiration photo indicating the future layout. The shower fixtures, vanity and toilet will remain on the right wall, which contains all the water pipes and plumbing, and the future shower area will be wider (32″) than the old 30″ tub to provide more elbow room.
Different from the inspiration photo above, the shower door panel will be frameless like the one we installed downstairs and in the inspiration photo below. It should create a roomy appearance for this 5′ x 8′ bathroom.
Similar to the inspiration photos above, our bathroom has an east-facing window which lets in a lot of light. We want to keep this bathroom bright and cheerful, so we will be using white tiles on the wall, and dark tiles on the floor, similar to the inspiration below:
In terms of the tile choices, I always likes high contrast not only in color but also in size. In our master bath downstairs, we chose big dark tiles on the floor and one wall, and white subway tiles on the other two walls:
To make things a bit different, we will switch to dark small tile on the floor and white big tiles on the wall for this bathroom.
Choosing smaller tiles on the floor allows us to keep the tile pattern uniform throughout the entire bathroom, including in the shower pan area. This will help the bathroom look bigger too.
One feature we really liked about our master bath is the shower niche spinning the entire back of the shower. Unfortunately, due to the window height we are not able to replicate this look. But what we can do instead, is have the niche on the side of the shower, and terminate it on the exterior wall, like that in the photo below.
Other details we plan to add include a pocket door:
And wooden/glass shelves above the toilet for towel and tissue storage.
With white toilet and vanity I think this small bathroom will look simple, clean, comfortable, and cheerful. Imagine opening the pocket door and seeing bright tiled walls, dark and geometric patterned floor, glass shower, with a touch of wood and lots of green plants! Surely we have a long way to go – Slav has been working on electrical over the past a couple weeks and it took a lot longer then we anticipated – but looking for inspirations gives me hope and motivation to push forward. Stay tuned, friends and family. It will be great!
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