Bath conundrum

tomstickland

A friend of mine want's to renovate his bathroom.
We're going to do the job together and we have plenty of experience of this sort of thing.

The problem is that the bath is 1.5m long rather than the standard 1.7m. He wants to get a full size bath in.

We've had a good look at the problem and discussed several ideas.

The best idea we've had is to take down the plasterboard at the tap end of the bath. We can single skin a section of the wall and this will gain us 90mm. It's an airing cupboard on the other side.

However, this isn't quite enough for the end of the bath to give enough room at the other end for leg room on the sink. The bathroom is very small, so there's no real options for rearranging the layout.

We are prepared to remove more plasterboard and build a new skin inside the airing cupboard. This can gain us the 200mm necessary to get a full length bath in.

However, the bath width is such that to do that properly we'd have to move the airing cupboard outwards by 200mm so that the door of the cupboard clears the new wall. That's getting a bit too much work.

It would be possible to cut a small chunk out of one corner of the bath so that it cleared the door frame, and we'd then build a slightly narrower hole in the wall for the bath to stick into. We weren't so keen on this one.

We've found a curvy bath that is 500mm wide at the far end, so we could fit this into our slightly too narrow hole.

However, we'd prefer to find a bath that didn't have any tap holes in it and had more bath in the available length. So we're wondering if anyone makes one like that. i.e. Fitting a full length bath tub into a shorter overall length by reducing the size of the shelf at each end.

andrew-b

Difficult to visualise without seeing ..photos and/or sketched plan and maybe we can come up with an alternative. As your getting structural, any other walls that could be opened up (preferably non-supporting!), could doorway be moved to allow a rearrangement?

There are shower baths where the shower end is wider than the other that might help. Or maybe compromise with a 1600mm bath which are about if you search. A centimetre or so of width could be recessed into the walls either side if that helps too.

I suppose if you were really adventurous you could build your own bath...like a really small swimming pool to fit the available space!

Doozergirl

Finding it hard to picture it

tomstickland

I'll do a plan, but it doesn't matter to my main question - are there any baths with less overhang at the ends.

tomstickland

tomstickland

Here's the thin bath idea:
http://www.plumbworld.co.uk/ideal-standard-studio-2459-2493/2

tomstickland

http://www.victoriaplumb.com/Baths/Straight-Baths/Single-Ended-Straight-Baths/Spacesaver-Bath-RH_596.html

keystone

tomstickland wrote: »

I'll do a plan, but it doesn't matter...........

Oh yes it did - a great deal. You appear to be missing the obvious:

Move the WHB over to the right or;

Fit a smaller WHB or;

Fit a Corner WHB or;

Relocate the WHB to the opposite wall between the loo and the door.

Thats 4 choices that avoid unecessary faffing with the bath. 2.2m is plenty of room to fit a full sized bath and a WHB TBH.

Cheers

Edit:

Or Move the WHB to the R H wall completely and rehang the door to open outwards instead of inwards;

Or Reclocate WHB to opposite wall as above but give yourself more space by rehanging the door to open outwards instead of inwards.

Perhaps I'll think of some more later but that should give you enough to think about for a while.

aliasojo

I agree with keystone, I think the wash basin is the problem more than the bath. Small handrinse basin on the same wall as the door would solve the problem maybe.

andrew-b

No way can you have a washbasin between loo and door..you'd need to be a stick insect to get past that! Also you need room in front of WC to physically stand up.

Nice plan though!

A 1700mm bath without going into the linen cupboard leaves you only 500 for a basin in that corner..that's pretty tight as you'll be stood close to the wall. Although you can get basins to fit in that space it's not really suitable for a bathroom..a cloakroom where the basin is just to wash hands fair enough! For what it's worth our basin is in a recess about 680mm wide (we were going to try shove a bath into it ..i even cut out the plaster before we changed minds to ditch it for shower!) - i wouldn't really recommend any narrower a space.

As you've already considering the structural route: I'm thinking rather than try to achieve the impossible of fitting everything into such a tight space what if you were to move the entire door wall downwards in your plan by 300 to 400 mm - then have bath top to bottom of the plan on the left..then basin and wc lined up along the top wall you've currently got the bath along. Your then reusing all the pipework of existing bath, WC and basin use the pipework of the basin already there. Tricky bit is the WC waste ..but not impossible. Downside is if the door wall is a supporting wall then we're talking lintels and bigger bucks. Would strongly suggest a trip upto the loft to find out. A new stud partition won't break the bank and the whole bathroom design suddenly becomes easy! Expect there will be something wrong with that plan though..things are rarely as straightforward as they seem!

tomstickland

keystone wrote: »

Oh yes it did - a great deal. You appear to be missing the obvious:

Move the WHB over to the right or;

Fit a smaller WHB or;

Fit a Corner WHB or;

Relocate the WHB to the opposite wall between the loo and the door.

Thats 4 choices that avoid unecessary faffing with the bath. 2.2m is plenty of room to fit a full sized bath and a WHB TBH.

Cheers

Edit:

Or Move the WHB to the R H wall completely and rehang the door to open outwards instead of inwards;

Or Reclocate WHB to opposite wall as above but give yourself more space by rehanging the door to open outwards instead of inwards.

Perhaps I'll think of some more later but that should give you enough to think about for a while.

Yes, we've been through all of those ideas already.
My friend's favoured solution is an outward opening door.
None have been rejected, but this thread was specifically about bath options.