Bathrooms, shower rooms, small rooms (sorry, long!)

[petitverdot]

We have recently moved into a lovely 4 bedroom Edwardian family home. Lovely size rooms (with the exception of the below question!), loads of long, difficult work to do potential.

We need to start doing some boring-but-important stuff like boilers and windows but we'll be doing some reconfiguration and will need to work out what that will look like before we start on anything that might be affected.

My question is about bathrooms. Currently, we have a small main bathroom, which is very cramped with bath and separate power shower. There is also a guest ensuite with a free-standing bath and shower over (not a power shower improved basically not worth using the pressure is so bad - though this may be corrected with new boiler).

My feeling is neither of these rooms is big enough to contain a separate bath and shower. So we have a couple of options:

1. Make the main bathroom a really nice shower room with power shower and take out the bath. Keep the bath in the ensuite. That means less work/expense as the power shower element is already there. But is this going to make the house feel "weird" when reselling?

1. Change the main bathroom to bath with shower over and the ensuite to a power shower. This means more work I think and will also mean we won't have access to the nice shower if we have guests over

We are also planning to do a loft conversion with a master suite and bathroom - there will be plenty of room up there for a really good sized bathroom of my dreams...

What would you do? If we have the attic bathroom would option 1 be OK or is the first floor "family bathroom" too important?

I would say option 2, for anyone withchildren a bath will be considered a must, and as for the power shower, well unless you host for mounths on end it will only be for short periods you won't have it. Also, no one has power showers where I live, but there are shower heads where depending how you set it the water comes out of strategic holes that build up the pressure to the point that it can be painful. So maybe you could try to find a shower head that does this for the main bathroom as a compromise.

Agreed - main bathroom should have a bath. Ensuite is fine with power shower. Keep the attic bathroom (when time is right) for you!

Why can't you have a power shower over the bath in the main bathroom in solution 2?

I'm a bit confused by the options. IMO the powering and bath vs shower cubicle are 2 separate issues. I agree with others that bath in main bathroom and shower in guest room makes sense. I'd put the best shower in the one you're planning to use more.

We have a pumped shower in the main bathroom and an electric shower in the 2nd bathroom. The electric one is not much used, but because it has a cold feed we can always have a hot shower even if the boiler breaks or we run out of hot water (through overuse of power shower!). It was installed with future teenage bathroom hoggers in mind, but it's come in useful a few times already.

We have a large bath with shower over in the main bathroom. Loads of space and probably could put in a separate shower when the kids are older. We have an ensuite with a large walk in shower.

The kids tend to have baths though dd sometimes has a shower in our bathroom. The shower over the bath is very rarely used.

They are both pretty fierce - have a pump in the cellar that soups up the water pressure so that the shower in the attic and the taps in the bathroom don't suffer from poor pressure.

Not really what you asked, and sorry if you already have this covered, but you mention the pressure being very low. How far have you investigated this? Period houses often have old lead pipes inside and outside the property which get clogged up and limit the amount of water that can get through them (technically flow rather than pressure). A new boiler in itself won't necessarily make any difference to this, you will need to replace the pipes themselves. On the plus side, once this is done you probably won't need a power shower as the flow will be strong enough.

Only thought I would mention this as we went through all this last year when we bought our doer-upper and it would have been useful to have known beforehand.

We had this dilemma, sort of, we had

1. Family bathroom that was just a shower but had room for a bath (no bath in it)
2. En suite to master with a bath but no shower
3. Another (spare room) en suite just a shower with no room for a bath
4. Downstairs loo with room for a shower / wet room but downstairs so no point and it's a useful boot room anyway

In the end we

1. Redid the main bathroom, left it as shower but a much better one
2. Redid the master en suite so there was a shower as well as a bath
3. Put a bath in the spare room bedroom, next to the en suite shower room
4. Left the loo as just a loo / boot room

In terms of resale the main bathroom could fit a bath if someone wanted to put one in, the bath could easily come out of the bedroom if someone didn't like it and so I'm not worried

We did what suited our family best really - the main bathroom gets most use but the master en suite is useful and it is good to have a guest bath

I agree about it being very useful to have one electric shower, it's saved us when the boiler has packed up

So I think if you're going to do the attic then option 1 would work

Also we decided that we would use a shower more than a bath so the main bathroom being a large shower room rather than a small bath plus shower made more sense

Also, as long as you have a bath somewhere I think it's fine for resale

But the main thing is what's going to suit you and your family now I think

I'd go with option 2 If you are ever likely to want to sell. A 4 bedroom house is likely to be bought by someone with children, and that means that they won't want children traipsing into the enduite whenever they want a bath - not just little children, but teenage daughters with period pains, or aching athletes taking magnesium baths, or a nine year old who's covered in vomit but is too shaky to stand up in a shower cubicle.

We had similar issues at our last house a period wreck that was in need of complete restoration -

The 'family' bathroom did contain a bath (with ancient, barely functioning bath shower mixer over), but the room was so tiny it wasn't really functional for family use.

On the ground floor there was a 1980s annex with lovely pampas ensuite comprising bath, basin and loo.

We initially intended to stay forever so took the risky decision to convert one of the three first floor bedrooms that had at one time interconnected with the master bedroom into a large (12' x 12' approx) ensuite with basin, loo and free standing bath with bsm, but no separate shower as this was to be mainly my domain and I'm not a shower person. We also added a large walk-in airing cupboard in this space.

Next we removed the knackered old suite including bath from the family bathroom and instead fitted a large shower cubicle plus loo and basin.

The ground floor bathroom got moved completely as we opened up the annex to become a further living room, but wanted to retain a d/s shower room as at that point we thought one/both my parents might move in with us. Therefore we swapped the aged suite for another large shower etc.

The kitchen extension we built had a further loo & basin in the utility, handy for coming in from the garden/drive.

We had also planned to add a bathroom on the second floor, servicing the two bedrooms up there, but we instead decided to move.

Our buyers - a family with three DC were not at all bothered by the fact that the 'family' bathroom had no bath whilst the only bath in the house was in the ensuite - although this was accessible from the landing too, kind of Jack & Jill style. They loved the flexibility the downstairs configuration offered and were ecstatic to be moving to a house with four loos