Anyone good at planning who can help me out with a partition idea?

[DuelingFanjo]

I live in a very small tarraced house with 2 bedrooms. We have to go through one of the bedrooms to get to the bathroom. I have a 20 week old baby and at some point will want him to have is own room plus it's just really annoying that visitors have to go through a room to get to the toilet/bath or if anyone stays we have to go through 'their' room to use the loo.

So... I want to partition off the room, making it smaller, and create a room for my son etc. The only way I can do this is to create a corridor and take quite a lot of space off the room.

I've added a picture of the plan I have drawn onto my profile. Is anyone willing to take a look for me?

I would just like to know if I am doing it in the best way and also if it makes sense to have the door where I've planned it. I figured that with the radiator where it is, it woud be best to put the door there so I can maximise wall spoace on the other walls for bed, wardrobe etc.

We will want to sell or rent this house out eventually and DH thinks it's a bit of a waste of time creating this space but I am really keen to do it to give our son a space of his own. I also think it will make it more sellable or rentable.

Thanks in advance

ps,

the green bits are windows, the red dotted line is where the partition would be.

You're losing a lot of space with that layout, aren't you?
I think that you need to swap the direction of the stairs, so that you can have a corridor that goes directly to the bathroom, rather than going in an 'L' shape around the bedroom. That way you're losing much less space from the bedroom. I believe that changing the direction of stairs is suprisingly little work for a builder, although you'd need to redecorate all the rooms where doors had changed location.

Cost-wise, I'd imagine you'd immediately make the money back when you sold or rented, but Noddy and Lala are the experts there!

I don't think it would be an easy job to change the stairs. If we swap them completely round then we end up having the same space loss issue downstairs as the stairs would have to go through our sitting room or we'd have dead space in our other room (wher DH does his computer stuff); the only other possibility is some kind of spiral staircase in thekitchen leading directly up to the bathroom but I am guessing this would mean major disruption and cost.

I am pretty much resigned to losing the space upstairs. :(

the other option was to knock through the over-stairs cupboard and make a corridor which would give occupants of each room their own access to the bathroom but still wouldn't solve the visitors having to go through a room.

What's the plan like downstairs? Could you draw that for us?

I'd favour

(a) turning the stairs - you don't need an identical staircase so one that has two turns in it will take up much less room than a straight one, iyswim

(b) expanding the over-stairs cupboard - this will be much cheaper than turning and you can chisel a bit out of each bedroom to make a reasonable size en-suite for the front bedroom and the back bedroom uses the existing bathroom. It doesn't really matter if guests have to go through a bedroom because they wouldn't be overnight guests presumably so you wouldn't be asleep in yours, or if they were staying overnight, they would be in your son's room and he would be in with you. Possibly the money you save you could build an understairs loo on the ground floor if the staircase is still enclosed down there.

(c) build an extension across the side return for the ground and first floor, move the second bedroom back and have the bathroom in the area that you have allocated for your son's room with the corridor. Expensive but will give you extra space.

I think your husband is wrong - an upstairs bathroom that can only be reached through a bedroom is a real turn-off for most people and would severely limit the people you can rent to. (b) sounds the easiest and possibly the cheapest providing plumbing is straightforward. If it were me, I would shunt forward or backwards into the bedrooms by c 60cm and then square it off with a run of fitted cupboards so you don't have an odd jutting out corner in your bedrooms.

the downstairs basically has a front door which leads into a small hallway (no space for stairs. The stairs cut through the house at a right angle so there's one room at the front which you turn right into before the stairs, then the stairs and then past the stairs from the hallway there's our sitting room which leads into a small kitchen at the back.

A lot of houses on this street have knocked the two downstairs rooms into one open plan area and their stairs lead up through that open plan area but we really don't want to do that as it involves load bearing walls.

If we turned the stairs completely then we would have to go through the front room to go up the stairs and I assume we'd need to change doorways around?

Our house is also a terrace and has a loft conversion at the very top, a double room and a small boxroom on the middle floor, then a kitchen, tiny shower room and living room on the bottom. The shower room is not only extremely small (you can't even extend your arms out before you touch the sides) it's awkwardly placed, being right next to the kitchen. So we're saving up from next year for an extension. But having the bathroom on the ground floor does mean it's not taking up valuable bedroom space.

sadly we have no room to extend. We can't go back as it's in the deeds that we're not allowed, plus we only have a yard so wouldn't want to lose what little space we have.

is doing it the way I am really bad? Everything else would be so expensive, though I would be interested in more views RE turning the stairs and how much that might cost?

A really narrow corridor would be 85cm wide. Mark the corridor on the floor with masking tape using that measure as a guide, then stand in the back room and look at the floor space. It really will take up a lot of room as well as being dark and awkward. I do think an en-suite in the overstairs cupboard would solve a lot of problems and make the house very rentable if you decided to move.

thanks everyone. We did think about an en suite but I would consider a staircase shuffle if it wasn't too costly. I think rather than an en suite I would knock through the cupboard and just create 2 ways of getting to the bathroom.

The coridoor would have to be the width of the bathroom door really.

corridor

I think that would be very difficult to configure in such a small space.

If there lots of identical houses around, have a look on RightMove and see if any are for sale, with floorplans. You may get some ideas that way.

I have added a rough pln of the downstairs to my photos.

so... looking at it, do you think it would be possible for us to turn the stairs around, perhaps having a turn in the stairs which starts in the back downstairs room where the understairs cupboard is and which would then go up the other way but still leave an entrance ito the back sitting room?

One problem would be that the stairway would be dark unless we could move some of the back sitting room wall - so the staircase would essentially be IN the sitting room.

I think this might work but not sure?

Also - how long do these things take? We would probably have to move out if there was no access to the bathroom or bedrooms for more than 24 ours or so.

hours

Does the bathroom run the full width of the house or is the bit on the bottom left not really there? If it does run right along the house, another option (probably expensive) is to remove what I assume is a chimney breast and the stack and have the corridor go straight down that wall.

Yeah, sorry - that was my bad drawing there's a window at the back of the back bedroom. The Bathroom is over the kitchen but not the whole width of the house.

My first thoughts were to swap the direction of the staircase but thats been discussed.

How about a spiral staircase (as you look at you plan, it would be on the right hand side)?

I know they have their own limitations but it would mean you would gain extra space downstairs, plus where it comes upstairs , you can run a short corridor to the bathroom (losing much less room that an L shaped one)

A spiral staircase would be great but I'm not sure about the safety sapect for a toddler or baby?

I would swap the staircase and have the entrance in the sitting room or dining room. You could then lose the hall entirely if you wanted to and have a larger front room.

It's difficult to judge but could you keep the horizontal part of the new corridor but put the bathroom next to the chimney breast and relocate the bedroom to the right hand side and into the bathroom? This may have plumbing implications for the toilet though - generally you want to avoid moving that because the size of the soil pipe makes it difficult to put a new soil pipe in a different location.

yeah - I could do that but I have no money to do it really. Which is why the partition thing was secided on... it would be cheap if not ideal.

I don't really want to lose the hallway, I don't like walking straight from the street into a room but I am now thinking just flipping the stairs so they go in the opposite direction with a little turn into the back room (which is where we spend most of our time) where the understairs cupboard is now.

Blimey - I should never have bought this house but I was in a rush after splitting with my ex and selling another house. Wish I had waited as it was just before the prices crashed so if I had banked my money (I sold at just the right time) and rented for a while I could have got a much better house.

Don't do the partition thing - it's going to be a long, weird, poky, dark corridor space. My dh is an architect - I'll ask him when he comes home. But I know he would say forget the partition idea.

What about making the nursery your room with ensuite bathroom, and putting a loo/shower room in your bedroom (to become the nursery)?

Basically I agree with lalalonglegs' idea (b) - make that cupboard a shower room (extend it if nec), then you've got ensuites for both rooms.