Bathroom renovation and installation in France

Bathroom Renovation and Installation

General

As with 'kitchen renovation' the description 'bathroom renovation' is usually misleading, because a typical property renovation project will include the addition of one or more new bathrooms rather than an effort to improve one that is already in place.

So part of this page will seem familiar to you if you have already read 'kitchens'...

I'm not going to talk about bathroom styles - there are too many to consider, and numerous glossy magazines that will help you. Instead I will focus on the practicalities to be considered first.

The first thing to consider with bathrooms is of course where should they be placed. The farmhouse we renovated had a toilet and a shower in a 1950's ground floor extension, and no bathroom or toilet facilities anywhere else. This is not usually best modern practice.

En-suite bathrooms are often required, and usually somewhere upstairs...What we did, and may often be the best solution, is to lose a bedroom somewhere centrally placed and to convert it. This enabled us to have a family bathroom and an en-suite shower-room in what had been a bedroom. It also has the benefit  of keeping plumbing work in one area of the house, reducing costs and disruption.

Adding bathrooms on to your drawn plans is easy. Adding them in practice is more difficult. Being upstairs, they need a water supply to be put in place, which can perhaps be kept discrete (passing via the attic is common), but they also need waste pipes which are large, noisy and have to slope downwards. Channelling a toilet waste pipe into a stone wall is quite a major task if it needs to run 10 metres or more!

If you have a typical 'old house' construction, there will be floorboards on the first floor resting directly on the beams of the rooms below. Hence there is no space between the ceiling of one room and the floor of the room above in which to hide pipes.

The alternative is to take the pipes through the walls and down the outside of the building, but again this needs to be planned carefully if it is not to spoil the look of the exterior.

Each bathroom should be planned quite carefully before you start. Typical considerations include:

• shower doors - they need to have space to open easily
• toilet - needs at least 30 cm of space either side if at all possible
• bath - the taps usually go at the wall end, but that means when you are in the bath you are looking at a wall instead of your new bathroom. Perhaps consider taps fitted into the wall at the side
• heating, and towel radiators - keep space for these if necessary
• flooring - needs to be watertight. If you have old floorboards with big gaps between them they may need relaying or covering
• noise - when all that separates you from the kitchen below is one layer of floorboards, you will find that sound will pass through clearly. Depending on your sensibilities, you may be embarrassed if everyone downstairs eating their breakfast can hear what you are doing...if so a second floor, separated from the first by a layer of sound insulation, may be required. This is more complicated than it sounds, because changing the level of the floor in one room means there is a little step up to enter the room, which can cause problems of tripping over, and door length adjustments.
• visibility - the room probably has a transparent glass window. We kept ours, to keep the appearance from the outside, but added a lace curtain. Remember that at night with the light on and the shutters open a lace curtain is almost completely transparent...close the shutters is necessary!

Now you can start looking at those glossy mags!