In the recent weeks when I’ve talked about my plans for the sunroom, I’ve had a couple of people comment about the possibility of opening up the original “master bathroom” (a term I use very loosely to describe this tiny bathroom) to the sunroom to make it usable again, and to give us a third bathroom, and a second full bathroom.
Initially, I dismissed the idea. In my mind, that bathroom doesn’t exist. At least, I pretend like it doesn’t exist. And just like the sunroom, I’ve looked forward to the day that it can be torn down. Opening it up, fixing it up, and making it usable feels like a huge step backwards. But in the last couple of weeks, and as I’ve felt my dream of a new addition on our house slip further and further away, I’ve really started to seriously consider the idea.
So let me back up a bit and explain so that you can get your bearings. Here’s the floor plan of our house as it currently stands. The bathroom I’m talking about is the little room that is all black to the left of the sunroom and behind our current master bathroom.
If you’ll remember, the room that is currently our master bathroom used to be the original master bedroom when we bought the house, and it had this little bathroom off of it.
Pretty early on, we had the window that you see in the photo above to the left of the bathroom replaced with a door. The closed door that you see on the wall to the right of the bathroom was the original walk-in closet in that bedroom, but it was a pretty small closet.
When we decided to turn this room into our big accessible bathroom, the wall that enclosed that closet was torn out to make the room larger. And then the doorway that went from the bedroom into the hallway, which you can see on the far right of the picture below, was closed up. And a new doorway (which cannot be seen in the photo below because I’m standing in it to take the photo below) was created so that this room could be accessed from the other bedroom, which is now our master bedroom.
So when the new master bathroom remodel got underway, this was how it started shaping up. A new wall was built to section off the shower and the water closet behind that new wall and to create a spot for the bathtub. But this photo was taken before the cement board went up in the shower, and if you look closely, you can still see the original (closed) door to that original tiny master bathroom.
Here’s that same view in the new, finished master bathroom. But behind that wall in the shower still sits the original tiny master bathroom. It’s now completely inaccessible. It can’t be accessed from anywhere inside the house, and there’s no way to access it from outside unless I want to crawl through the one window that remains in that room.
Before it was closed up, all of the plumbing was capped off because I didn’t want any chance of a plumbing leak that I couldn’t get to. And there’s no electricity going to that room, either. It’s literally just a strange little appendage on the back of our house that I forget is even there, and that I had planned to tear down along with the sunroom.
Other than the vanity, which I removed, everything else still looks like this — the toilet, the tub, and even the shower curtain are all still there.
But, as a few of my very observant readers and commenters have pointed out, that bathroom shares this wall with the sunroom.
Since the sunroom is basically one big (and almost completely filled) storage room right now, I had to go back to the original photo that I took of the sunroom right after we bought the house to show you the shared wall from inside the sunroom. But it’s this wall shown in orange.
That means that I could put a doorway on that wall, open up 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 initially wrote off this idea completely, but now I’m seriously considering it. The one drawback is that the bathroom is a pier and beam foundation, which means that it’s level with the rest of the house. The sunroom is on ground level. That means that I would have to add two steps from the sunroom to the bathroom to make that bathroom accessible. That feels strange to me, but honestly, I’ve seen stranger things done to old homes. And sometimes with old homes, we have to work with what we have.
When I get to the sunroom project, I’ll be removing all of the paneling from the walls. I think once that’s done, and once I can see what’s inside and behind those walls, I’ll be able to make a decision on whether or not I want to proceed with this option. But for now, I’m seriously considering it. I definitely like the idea of having a second full bathroom in the house, even if it is a tiny one.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
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