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You are here: Home / My House / An Architect’s House – Master Shower

An Architect’s House – Master Shower

June 24, 2010 by Bob Borson 21 Comments

I have been working on selecting plumbing vessels and faucet sets on one of our projects here at the office and seeing all the really great stuff that is out there just makes me salivate for the time when I can address the needs of my own bathroom. I don’t anticipate any work beginning in the near future but I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the current layout, situation and issues that lie before me. I would state for the record that my wife and I have differing opinions about our bathroom; she is for blowing things up and starting over and I would rather work with what I have and just clean it up.

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Existing Master Bathroom Plan

So this is the plan – hopefully everyone here can read plans so I am just going to fast forward a little and get to the narrative. We have a playroom for a shower – even by today’s standards, this 8′ x 8′ shower room is large. But that is only one of the issues (not that large is bad but it isn’t necessarily good either). Some of the highlighted issues are:

Party Section Elevation
  • The ‘bathtub’ isn’t really a bathtub – it’s a glorified depression into the slab. The one positive I will say about this ‘feature’ is that it lowers you down which ends up providing you some visual protection from the outside.
  • There was a leak of something in the past and the bottom 12″ or so of the wet wall were demolished and then replaced with an unfortunate tile selection. When we bought the house, there was a 1/4″ – 1/2″ gap along the wall where I can only assume water was going to die (but most assuredly trying hard to take out a bunch wood with it along the way). At least I was able to use some clear silicon and take care of that issue so future water damage averted but we have to look at it.
  • There is a lot of wood in the shower which surprisingly looks great (at least by great I mean ‘undamaged’).

  • There are/ were pendant light fixtures hanging down INTO THE SHOWER!! If that doesn’t make you raise an eyebrow, you must have liked your time working in the Russian Gulag. I pulled 2 of the three fixtures out and installed some vapor lights. The one I haven’t change yet is a heat lamp that despite the obvious safety hazard, I don’t want to freeze. The pendant light you can see located in the toilet room is one of the relocated fixtures from the shower. The glass housing was broken on the one in the bathroom and one of the two in the shower and having a bare light bulb hanging down in your shower is just wrong (you heard that here first). When  I took them out of the shower, I replaced the one in the bathroom.
view from the main shower entry into the courtyard
  • It gets cold because the shower is on two exterior walls, one of which is a large sliding glass door, which leads us to,
  • There is a large sliding glass door in the shower! Maybe when you are young and stupid you don’t mind standing naked in a room with your stuff on display to any stranger brave enough to look but when your my age, it takes some getting used to.
In case you have to go during the shower
  • There are 3 sets of sliding doors in the shower (that’s right – 3); One from the bathroom, one from the outdoor patio, and one from the toilet room. Mmmmm, direct access from the toilet to the shower. I can think of all kinds of reasons why that is super convenient but since I don’t live in a 3rd world country, most of them don’t apply. Something else that always struck me as funny is that the all the glass sliding doors from inside the house have privacy glass whereas the doors to the outside of the house are clear. Yeah, that totally makes sense because strangers don’t judge the size of your ass like the people who love you.
The courtyard outside the shower – thinking about installing some stadium seating and selling tickets

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So those are all the obvious issues that need to be addressed in some form but despite them, or maybe it’s because of them, I still like the space – just not that much as a shower and don’t want to blow it up and start over. Whenever I have let my architect friends come over and tour the house, as soon as they see the shower their first reaction is “I’m down to party”. Gross. That alone will force my hand into taking action, (just not the party kind of action).

(if you are interested in the first two installments, you can find Part I here and Part II here)

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