Big bathroom brings big relief

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/10/2018 (2561 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When hired to complete a lower level from scratch in a client’s basement, I was only given a few requirements: a fair-sized rec room, one large bedroom with a decent closet, a utility room and a BIG three-piece bathroom.

With the rough plumbing for a bathroom sink drain, shower drain and the toilet flange already mapped into the concrete, it only made sense to design the bathroom space first.

Like a painter with brush in hand, standing before a blank canvas, the lower level of Don Kennedy’s Sage Creek home was an empty space of concrete awaiting input. I began by marking out the potential interior wall locations on the ground with duct tape, to provide a visual of the intended walls. After a quick walk-though and a thumbs-up from Kennedy, the construction began.

The framing of interior and exterior walls was completed, all services run and insulation filled the cavities between the studs before the drywall was affixed to the studs and ceiling joists.

Once all the individual rooms were quarantined, my primary focus shifted towards the bathroom. Because of a main-floor supporting beam which ran from the bottom of the stairs of the lower level to the far end, this was the obvious location for an interior wall. Roughly nine feet from the exterior wall, this became the depth of the bathroom.

Due to the relative positioning of the toilet flange, sink drain and shower drain adjacent to the utility room wall, the width of the bathroom was ten feet. Standard bathrooms are usually a modest five feet by eight feet — Kennedy’s bathroom has more than twice the square footage. 

Given the space, several items would be required to populate it, including a sink vanity, a mirror and vanity light, a one-piece toilet, a linen closet and a very long shower stall with a barn-style glass shower door. For the floor, oversized two-foot square ceramic tiles were installed to lessen the illusion of depth. The shower stall was framed in a similar manner — the shower-faucet wall was outset by roughly eight inches, so the linen closet could be positioned on the switch wall, to the left of the entry door.

At the back of the shower stall, an 18-inch-deep seat was built into the design, with a partition wall adjacent to the toilet. This still provided a shower opening of nearly 72 inches. It was at this stage I realized most sliding barn-style shower doors max out at 60 inches. Luckily, a three-piece shower door by MAAX was offered on the Home Depot website as an online order only. The door was promptly ordered, and I completed all remaining bathroom tasks, as well as most of the other remaining lower-level remodel, while awaiting the arrival of this shower door.

Despite my best efforts to ensure prompt delivery, the third-party shipper Home Depot uses for online-order deliveries did not impress upon me a feeling of confidence. A few days after the anticipated delivery date had come and gone with no shower door in sight, I was told during my first inquiry call that “the item had been shipped and was still in transit.” The next day, I was told, “It should get there today” (already three or four days late).

By the time the matter had been escalated to a supervisor’s desk, the truth finally came out. The trucking company that picked up my door in Mississauga forgot to unload it during their stop in Winnipeg; it was now somewhere in Edmonton. As you can imagine, I was not impressed — the shower-door installation was the only task left to do! To make things worse, my girlfriend Carole and I were set to leave for Hawaii in less than a week. Luckily, the shipper finally managed to get the door back to Winnipeg, where it was then promptly delivered just in time for me to have it fully installed before we left on our long-awaited vacation.

The situation made me a bit nervous, but the entire job was completed on schedule, and I never bothered to worry my client with the misplaced shower door incident. 

Everything about this bathroom is BIG. The square footage, the oversized floor tiles, the long shower stall — even that three-piece glass shower door, which brought me BIG stress!

But hey, stuff happens — and in retrospect, none of that mattered when I saw Kennedy’s BIG smile when he laid eyes on his new bathroom for the first time.

BossEnterprise@outlook.com