How to make a first floor bathroom

[Pennykent]

New to here - would love to call on some forum knowledge for this! We are househunting and would love to move the bathroom from the ground floor to first floor in this house. The bedrooms are quite wide so we're hoping reconfiguration is possible - would prefer to still have 3 bedrooms afterwards.

One idea was to cut it out of space from both the master and second (middle) bedroom. As I understand it (from conversations with handy friends in the pub!) it would be the issue of the plumbing that would dictate if we could do this or not?

Image:
ibb.co/iQ3Rdd

It's far easier and cheaper to have the plumbing above the kitchen. How is the soil pipe going to get from the kitchen to the sewers otherwise?

Split the large room into 2, use the middle room has the master and pinch some space out of bed 3 for a wardrobe or similar.

You don't really want to go down the route of a loo macerator to get around the soil pipe issue.

Split bed 3 vertically into very small bed (8'8 x 7') and bath (8'8 x 5). Chop off 3' of bed 2 to add to bathroom so door comes off hall rather than making bed 3 any smaller.

Thanks @randommess...I'm hearing from you that a front bathroom is difficult to do? That probably explains why I've not seen a front bathroom in any houses we've viewed to date!

Regarding splitting the large room into 2, won't the big bay window get in the way?

You COULD have a bathroom on the front, but no one wants to see huge pipes going down the front of their house. I didn't want a downstairs bathroom either, so we discounted houses that had one

@titchy, do you mean like this? ibb.co/fxq8PJ

That might work, would need to think about if both the new smaller bedroom 3 and bathroom have sufficient space. But - the bathroom wouldn't have a window, right (unless you can build in a new one)?

Depends on where the street sewers are - it's about £ tbh!

Yes exactly that. It's not hugely expensive to have a window put in either.

Titchy's a great solution - are you going to keep the other bathroom downstairs?

I loved having a downstairs bath when kids were young you could potter around in the kitchen in full sight of them. Also means upstairs you could have it as a spacious shower room?

I don’t know know if its the same for others, but I can only see the bedrooms, so without the ground floor plan we can’t know where the plumbing is. Is the house detached, semi (if so which side attached) or terraced?
I have made an upstairs bathroom in a house, could have been your floor plan. We took the side part of the biggest bedroom, which kept two decent sized doubles and a tight double. We took the plumbing out that side of the property as the existing plumbing for the toilet was under the stairs, so could join into that sewer. We kept a downstairs toilet and made the rest of the existing bathroom into a utility.

Very good point @ImPreCis! I hadn't thought the ground floor relevant but clearly it is...ibb.co/hqMRTd. It's terraced so can't put the plumbing out the side, the sewer must be in the back (I'd need to recheck next week).

@RandomMess we would plan to knock down the extension (i.e. kitchen and bathroom) and rebuild open plan kitchen/diner...might be able to fit a bathroom somewhere in there yes. No DC yet so I'll have to take your word for it! In any case would need at least a shower room on 1st floor.