New Bathroom Addition Plans

I am so excited because our plans just got approved by the city and we officially have permits for our new master bathroom and closet addition!!!

A little background on the space… We have a fairly large unfinished ‘attic’ space off of our master bedroom. We had just been using it for storage but since our house only has one bathroom (on the main floor) we knew we wanted to eventually try and turn the attic into a bathroom and closet. While the space itself is quite large it has sloped ceilings on every wall except for one. Our house is an English Tudor so lots of steep roof pitches. This made the planning process a lot more difficult. We knew we could add a dormer and that would take care of planning around the sloped ceilings. However, dormers are $$$ and would also require us to hire an architect to produce plans, meaning even more $$$. So we really wanted to figure out how to make the space work without having to add any dormers. And while it took a lot of measuring, and re-measuring and measuring some more, we finally found a way to make it work without making the space feel awkward or small!

To make the space up to code there are certain areas that have to retain ceiling heights of at least 6’4″. This is specifically for sloped-ceiling bathrooms. So for instance, 21 inches in front of the toilet has to have a 6’4″ ceiling height. Why 21in? I have no idea. And then in the shower and directly in front of the shower entrance, you have to have a 24inx30in space that has a ceiling height of at least 6’4″ as well. This was the part that was tripping us up at first, and the reason we thought we might have to dormer. BUT, we realized we could simply move the existing door from our bedroom over about a foot and that would give us the ceiling height (plus more) that we needed to make the shower area up to code. And we are actually bringing the ceiling all the way up to the roof line, making the ceiling at its highest point 10ft!! Another way we are ensuring we maximize the space as much as possible is replacing the existing swing door with a pocket door. We’ll also be adding two skylights on the sloped ceiling side, one in the bathroom and one in the closet.

It took quite a bit of planning and patience to draft the plans we submitted for building permits. I’m pretty proud of myself because I drafted them myself and no corrections were needed! It was a tedious process but obviously totally worth it.

I created the above to-scale renderings to get a better visual of how the finishes would all come together and to see how spatially things would work together.

I also put together a visual (above) for all the finishes we have chosen for the space. The overall vibe is modern with a flair of tradition. I want to make sure the space feels like it still belongs in our 1932 English Tudor but also has our modern style. First things to start will be framing, followed by skylight installation, plumbing and electrical. It will all be getting started in the next couple weeks and I can’t wait to see all our planning and designs come to life!