The Hyphen

Ok we're getting very close to actually starting this project, so I better hurry up and blog the plans. Today, the hyphen! The hyphen is everything in the corridor that joins the existing house to the new bedroom. The architects call that section "the hyphen" and we like the term for it - it's the dash between two separate spaces (since I want a big bathroom, maybe I should  think of it as an "em" dash instead of a hyphen... yes I'm a grammar nerd). 

Very early ideas from the architect included altering our existing office and making it into a bathroom, but we already knew we wanted as little changed in our current home as possible, so I won't even show you those drawings. The first acceptable plan was this one:

You can see that past the brick walls of our home, the architect put a pretty traditional double-vanity bathroom to the right and a walk-in closet to the left. Nothing too exciting, but nothing problematic either. We were bummed to lose our existing bathroom window though (above the existing toilet, now covered by the walls of our new bathroom). We also went back and forth on whether we really needed two sinks (answer: no, but probably the next owner would, and actually they would be cheaper and more standard than getting a custom single-vanity for the large space). Otherwise, nothing really changed in this hyphen for a very long time, even as we tweaked the bedroom design. It didn't seem like there was much we *could* do. There's a bathroom and a closet, and we had a mostly fixed amount of space (and I wanted a relatively large shower). I also wanted a soaking tub but that seemed pretty unrealistic with our footprint.

But THEN, our summer brainstorming led us to move the walk-in closet behind the bed as a corridor, into the main rectangle of the bedroom and that freed up tons of possibilities for the left side of the hyphen. We decided that we wanted to go Euro style and separate the toilet from the rest of the bathroom. This would also allow us to shrink the right-side bathroom to where we wouldn't lose the window AND avoid having to relocate our existing HVAC. Yay! Then it was a matter of adjusting the layout to something that would feel comfortable and not too cramped.

This option creates a *very* small powder room (or WC, except since it has a sink I'm not really sure what the proper term is) with no window, and we worried it would feel claustrophobic. The door structure was also a little awkward, forcing us to enter a closet before entering the toilet area.

This one lays out the powder room with a window, though we lose a closet. The entry makes a lot more sense though, coming off the hallway rather than through a closet, but we worried it was excessively long and would look rather strange.

Using our "expertise" at CAD rendering, we made this suggestion to the architects:

Also not pictured, we proposed moving the doors to what is called the linen closet so that it opened into the powder room, since what you can't see here is that there are stairs to enter the hallway where it meets the existing house, so it made the door and shelving quite awkward. In the end, here is what we ended up with deciding on:

You'll see that the shower and vanity flip-flopped walls in order to make sure the two (now pocket) doors were in alignment, and we're strongly considering a steam shower (still researching, but it's in the plans). Our new layout has a powder room with open shelving and a closed linen closet on one side of the hyphen, and a double-vanity and sizable shower (possibly to include steam) on the other. This is all done without losing our existing window or HVAC (though we'll need a new unit to condition the addition, as you can see in this picture).

Now as we start to approach a contract and construction, it's time to talk products and mood boards, or whatever. Next time, tiles and vanities!