It’s no secret that our house is way too small for us. Since both our children ended up back living with us, we have had to get two portable cabins to house everyone. We decided to make some moves to remedy this situation. How’s this for exciting – we are working with an architect to draw up plans to triple the size of our house. The new addition will include a new master suite (yay!), a family room, a good sized laundry, a garage and some storage. To make this work, we are actually building an entire story below our existing house. The space under our house is almost tall enough to stand up, but it still means we will be moving quite a bit of earth.
As well as the addition of a new story underneath, we have decided to build an entire two bedroom separate apartment for Jenna beside our house. This seems like a good idea as part of our retirement plan. Home and income type of thing.
I’ll be sharing the progress as it happens (it will take a long while) but for now I wanted to talk about our bathroom.
As part of the new build, we decided to make our existing house more functional.
You can see from the plans below that our bathroom is an odd shape – the bath is tucked behind the toilet and the laundry is in the hallway. Every person who uses our facilities gets to literally see our dirty laundry – great huh! The other thing is that in the afternoons, the toilet is the sunniest room in the house.
We doing a swap-a-roo. The laundry will eventually move downstairs into a new space where we can have access to the outside and a clothesline. This will also mean that if you come in with dirty shoes, there’s somewhere to clean them.
The thing I’m most excited about right now is the new bathroom. As this can be done without too much disruption, it will be the first thing we tackle. You may have noticed that I’ve never shared any pictures of our bathroom – you’re about to see it in all it’s shocking glory! Are you ready???
Actually, this is what it looked like when we moved in. It’s since been painted white, has new flooring but it’s still really ugly. Oh, how I long for a beautiful bathroom!
The bathroom is moving into bedroom 3 and bedroom 3 is moving into the existing bathroom, toilet and laundry space. This will make both rooms larger and more functional.
The new bathroom/bedroom will be laid out like this:
With the concepts almost done, I wanted to start looking at what we would like in our new bathroom so I turned to my already very full Bathroom Pinterest Board.
I’m going to share some of my favourites here for you to drool over too.
I love baths so any house I live in has to have a bath! In fact, the architect was amused when he shared the first concepts (no bath in the ensuite) when I said it was a show stopper. But this isn’t about that bathroom – that will come later. For now, it’s about the new upstairs bathroom.
I love this bathroom from the Lily Pad Cottage and thought there are some components here I can replicate, the first being the bath.
After a quick search online I found this bath. I don’t love the bathroom but the bath works well.
My only concern about having this type of bath is cleaning around it. If it’s close to the wall (which ours will be) then how do you clean behind it? Help me out! If you have this type of bath, can you answer that question for me?
A stand alone shower is a must. At present, our shower is over the bath and we all hate it, let alone the fact that our shower is right in front of the window!
We are planning for a beautifully tiled shower like this one. We’ve never had a tiled shower before. This one is simple but stunning.
I love this combination rain head and hand held shower fixture. The shape is beautiful and it’s incredibly functional.
Tapware is the jewellery of the bathroom and there are so many styles that I love. This bathroom from Sarah Richardson (HGTV) is so beautiful and I love the tapware. The big decision here is what type of metal – should I go with the classic silver, or should I be brave and go with brass? Thoughts?
I really like the idea of having a dark blue vanity with a vessel sink like this one.
The hardware on this sink is spectacular – argh but I get lost in the details. For the moment, I found this sink from Annie and Oak that is beautiful and will serve the purpose well.
There won’t be much room in our new bathroom for additional storage but I’m really hoping that we can squeeze in a cabinet like this one from The Inspired Room.
Did you notice the flooring in the bathrooms I’ve shown you? The beautiful octagonal tile is just so timeless. Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck finding anything similar here in NZ – of course they are available in every Home Depot in the US. I'll have to spend some serious time looking for beautiful tile.
It’s got to be classic white subway tile all the way. Even though some may say it’s boring, in my opinion it’s timeless and beautiful. We used this tile in our kitchen and have never regretted it. If you want to see more of my kitchen you can see the reveal here.
Well, that’s it for my inspiration post. What do you think – there’s lots to choose from and it can be so overwhelming. Luckily, I have plenty of time to think about all these details before the bathroom is actually ready for these pretty touches.
Please note: This post contains affiliate links but the opinions shared are my own.
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July 19, 2022
Hi, my name is Carol Karl. I live in little old New Zealand. My family and I strive to live the most ‘real’ life we can – by that I mean that we eat real food, we live real lives and just generally be our most authentic selves.
