Bathroom Plan!

Well between my last post and this post, we sold our house, packed it up and moved all of our belongings into storage, and we are now living in the basement apartment of Matt's parents!

I'm really excited that we finally have a bathroom plan for our master bath (which will be the only full bathroom in the house). The room that we are turning into a bathroom was the original kitchen in the house. So while it was a small kitchen, it will be a really big bathroom! However, it is a little odd-shaped, with two windows and a diagonal wall on one end, so it made designing it a challenge.

Here are some photos of the bathroom when we first bought the house!

This first one is the door from our bedroom into the bathroom:

When you enter and look to the right:

 Then if you stand over by the windows you'll look back and see the door on the left, and a weird doorway to the right, that was probably an exterior door. This door on the angled wall leads under the stairs, which will be another half-bath. We will put a wall up just inside this door, and use it as a linen closet.

On this wall, between the linen close and the window, will be a space for a bathtub, eventually. All we need is a shower to move in, and we're building a separate shower to the right of the window.

Along this wall, under the mirror will be the sinks and the vanity. In the corner on the left, will be the toilet, so that the vanity will partially hide it. The toilet will sit right next to the window (hi neighbors!) Where I'm standing while taking this photo is basically inside the shower.

 Now here are some photos from a few days ago. Sorry about the storm windows that are being stored here, and the piano bench/tv stand I'm using for props. The toilet will be thrown out - we removed it from the old bathroom (which will soon be a laundry room) and it is gross, but we're just using it to "visualize" the room better:

 Here you can see that the piano bench and the tv stand are where the vanity will be:

So this window was originally going to be glass block - we thought the shower would go here. However, the guy installing one of our front windows accidentally put it in here. We hadn't completed the bathroom design, and we didn't want to re-design it based on someone's mistake, but we actually came up with a better plan once we considered how nice the window looked. We are replacing the bottom pane of this window with obscure glass. The view is so nice that we're going to leave the top pane clear:

This is the part I'm really excited about. Those storm windows are leaning on the wall where the tub will eventually be, and the shower will be to the right of the window. However, the window was originally a door -- and we're going to turn it back into an exterior door. Weird to have an outside door in your bathroom you say? Yeah, it's weird, but consider this: The door will face the backyard, and we have plans to build a low deck around the back of the house. The backyard is super sunny and we hope it's a neat outdoor living space in the warm months. SOMEday when we don't have 3 kids in college, we are hoping to put a hot tub right outside of this door, in a little private alcove. So now the exterior door makes sense. Outdoor hot tubs in Michigan are sometimes under-used if they're awkward to get to. Who wants to run cold and dripping through the house to get to a place you can change your clothes? But having a hot tub so close to our bathroom, you could slip right in, toss your suit into the bathtub and wrap a warm towel around you! This is most likely several years down the road, but that's one big challenge of not having a lot of money right now -- we want to make long-term decisions now, instead of having to re-do them later when we think of it. Matt has already found the door at Home Depot - it is a one-paned exterior door (big window) with a draw-able shade housed inside the pane.

Here is the corner to the right of the door, and those tape lines will be the shower. It's not a huge shower, but it should be long enough to be comfortable.

To recap - exterior door on your left where the window is, then shower, then toilet, vanity on the right wall:

I'm so happy to have a plan!!