My first impression when I walked into our old bathroom was that something was very wrong with it. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but once I got inside and door hit you in the backside if you tried to walk straight through it. The shower was tucked into the corner so hitting your elbow on the wall was inevitable when you tried to wash your hair, and don’t get me started on the gap between the vanity and wall.
The vanity certainly wasn’t suited for storing anything other than toothbrushes, and the toilet was so close to the bathtub that it took some serious gymnastics to sit down. Storage consisted of a single medicine cabinet that was too small to store anything other than toothpaste and floss. Poorly-designed rooms not only frustrate you when you walk into them, they literally suck the joy out of your day.
Every day. When you’re rushed getting ready in the mornings because you don’t have enough room to function comfortably it sucks.
Trying to figure out where you’re going to put things when you’re getting dressed for a night out is annoying.
I hated our old bathroom with every fibre of my being, and I put up with it for three months before ripping the whole thing out. If you remember from our shell excavation post, our bathroom had the toilet immediately inside the doorway, then the vanity across from it with the shower tucked in the back corner. Plumbing was kind of all over the place since the stack was along this wall, but everything else fought against that like it was some kind of design sin.
When I first got into planning this project, I made a diagram of all of the existing plumbing I could find. I spent an entire weekend crawling around the bathroom with a stud finder locating pipes and marking them down on my drawing. What I found was that if I moved the toilet it would need to extend the drain line about four feet which was manageable, but not cheap.
The shower was easy enough to relocate since the drain was pretty much where it needed to be if I rotated the layout 90 degrees. I drew about thirty different floor plan iterations on graph paper. Yes, I said graph paper.
There’s something about sketching it out the old fashioned way that forces you to think about how you use the space on a day-to-day basis versus how cool it might look with a 3D render. I sat in the bathroom for hours with a scratch piece of paper trying to layout the fixtures. My wife thought I was crazy trying to find me midnight at the kitchen table scribbling out squares that represented toilets.
The breakthrough for me was deciding I could flip everything. Instead of having the toilet come first I could move the vanity up to the door. This would allow me to create a larger countertop with more storage, move the toilet to the side wall with plenty of clearance around it, and give me the opportunity to rotate the shower 90 degrees and gain tons of space.
Rule number one of Bathroom Feng Shui: You should be able to walk to any fixture without having to navigate around another fixture. I know, it sounds dumb when I write it out like that, but you’d be surprised how many bathrooms don’t take this into consideration when designing the layout. By swinging the vanity to straight ahead when you walk in you immediately give the bathroom some purpose.
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I expanded the width of the vanity to 48” (the old one was only 24” wide, seriously?!?). Plus, I gave the toilet 18” of space on both sides. Revolutionary, right?
I couldn’t believe how much larger the shower became when I flipped the layout. I was able to take the entire back wall of the bathroom for the shower allowing us to not only increase the size to a nice 36-by-48-inch space, but also incorporate a built-in bench and niches for shampoo bottles. The old shower was so small I felt like I was performing brain surgery every time I tried to wash my hair.
Moving the toilet cost me about $1,200 and rerouting the shower cost another $800, but remember how I said it took me fifteen minutes every morning just to deal with the insanity of that bathroom? Pretty nice payoff if you ask me. The generous vanity allowed me to install drawers instead of those ridiculous cabinets with doors.
DRAWERS, people. Drawers are the bomb-diggity when it comes to storage in the bathroom. I can finally organise my makeup (complete with section dividers) along with hair products without having to stash them on the edge of the sink like before.
Oh, and speaking of the sink….I was also able to add a nice tall cabinet next to the vanity that’s great for towels, cleaning supplies, and any extra toiletries that I want to hide from my wife. Lighting was another huge game-changer for us. With our old layout you literally could not get away from your own shadow no matter where you stood at the sink.
Being able to move the vanity allowed me to add sconces on either side of the mirror as well as a ceiling fixture that actually lights up the shower instead of leaving it in darkness.
Another thing I didn’t think about was improving the drainage in the shower. Our old shower always had a puddle of water in the bottom no matter how much we used the shower sucker.
Because of how we pivoted the layout now I was able to build the proper slope into the shower pan when we started framing. No more puddles of water at the end of my shower! It takes me about five minutes now to get ready in the morning instead of fifteen.
I love wandering into our bathroom, moving around while I get ready and not having to worry about hitting something or where I should put my toiletries. It feels like we doubled the size of our bathroom without actually changing a thing. Our remodel ended up costing just over $8,500.
That includes labour, materials, and fixing all of the additional problems we uncovered when we opened up the walls. It wasn’t cheap by any means, but I use the bathroom at least twice a day so if you really break down the cost per use it’s not bad at all. More importantly, it eliminated the daily annoyance that was truly ruining my day every.single.morning.
