As I’ve talked about my plans for the sunroom over the last few weeks, a few people have commented on the possibility of opening the original “master bathroom” (a term I use very loosely to describe this tiny bathroom) onto the sunroom, making it usable again and giving us a third bathroom and a second full bathroom.
At first I rejected the idea. In my opinion this bathroom does not exist. At least I pretend it doesn’t exist. And just like the conservatory, I’ve been looking forward to the day it can be torn down. Opening it, repairing it, and making it usable feels like a huge step backwards. But over the last few weeks, as I felt like my dream of a new addition to our home was becoming more and more distant, I really started to seriously consider the idea.
So let me back up and explain a bit so you can get your bearings. Here is the floor plan of our house in its current form. The bathroom I’m talking about is the small room that is finished in all black to the left of the sunroom and behind our current master bathroom.
If you remember, the room that is currently our master bathroom was the original master bedroom when we bought the house and there was this small bathroom next to it.
Pretty early on, we replaced the window you see to the left of the bathroom in the photo above with a door. The closed door you see on the wall to the right of the bathroom was the original walk-in closet in this bedroom, but it was a fairly small closet.
When we decided to convert this space into our large, accessible bathroom, the wall surrounding the closet was torn out to expand the space. And then the door leading from the bedroom into the hallway, which you can see on the far right in the picture below, was locked. And a new door (which can’t be seen in the photo below because I’m standing in it to take the photo below) was created to allow this room to be accessed from the other bedroom, which is now our master bedroom.
As the new master bathroom remodel began, the following took shape. A new wall was built to separate the shower and toilet behind this new wall and to make room for the bathtub. But this photo was taken before the cement board was installed in the shower, and if you look closely you can still see the original (closed) door to this original tiny master bathroom.
Here is the same view in the new, completed master bathroom. But behind that wall in the shower is still the original small master bathroom. It is now completely inaccessible. It’s inaccessible from anywhere in the house, and there’s no way to access it from the outside unless I want to crawl through the only window left in that room.
Before it was closed, all the plumbing was capped because I didn’t want any risk of a leak in the plumbing that I couldn’t reach. And there is no electricity in this room either. It’s literally just a weird little addition to the back of our house that I forgot was even there and wanted to tear down along with the sunroom.
Other than the vanity, which I removed, everything else still looks the same – the toilet, bathtub, and even the shower curtain are still there.
But as some of my very thoughtful readers and commenters have pointed out, this bathroom shares that wall with the sunroom.
Since the sunroom is currently basically one large (and almost completely filled) storage room, I had to resort to the original photo I took of the sunroom right after I bought the house to show you the common wall in the sunroom. But it is this wall that is shown in orange.
This means that I could put a door on this wall, open the two rooms to each other and we could have another bathroom. It’s tiny, but it would be a full guest bathroom with a tub/shower, toilet, and vanity.
I completely dismissed this idea at first, but now I’m seriously considering it. The only downside is that the bathroom is based on a pier and beam foundation, meaning it is level with the rest of the house. The winter garden is on the ground floor. This means I would have to add two steps from the sunroom to the bathroom to make that bathroom accessible. This seems strange to me, but honestly I’ve seen stranger things done to old houses. And sometimes with old houses we have to work with what we have.
When I get to the sunroom project I will be removing all the paneling from the walls. I think once that’s done and I can see what’s inside and behind these walls, I can decide whether I want to move forward with this option or not. But at the moment I’m seriously thinking about it. I definitely like the idea of ​​having a second full bathroom in the house, even if it’s tiny.
