The Devil's in the en suite

Details details. Way back when I posted the final plans (as they were then) the ensuite had no door of its own, but was accessed via two sliding doors, one from the bedroom and one from the dressing room (see picture on right). It was never intended that the room wouldn't have its own door (it's a bathroom!), but when we thought about putting one in, the three door arrangement looked a bit excessive. There would still need to be a separation of the dressing room and bedroom, mainly to keep the light out, so when the plans were next redrawn we quietly dropped the sliding door on the bedroom side.

This week we came to look at the whole thing again as part of the revising and tidying up of the plans before they get turned into construction drawings. We questioned the notion of having a sliding door there at all, but replacing it with an ordinary door raised new issues about the overall dimensions of the room. The two fundamental problems are that the corridor space outside the en suite is wider than a normal hinged door, while the entranceway into the en suite is narrower. So what do we do?

My first suggestion (left) was to lengthen the wall at the back of the hot press to make the gap in the corridor narrow enough for a door. I also deepened the en suite slightly in order to fit a standard door to its entrance. To do this I sacrificed some of the space in the dressing room.

Dara's preference is for the door in the corridor to be closer to the bedroom. The big problem here is that we'd need a spur sticking out of the wall to make the gap narrower. When I drew this (right) it looked unwieldy so this isn't going to be a runner.

Neither of these options is especially space-efficient, and the deepening of the en suite at the expense of the dressing room seemed a bit excessive for the sake of a door.

So today we settled on the final option (left). It still involves enlarging the en suite, but width-ways, taking space out of the corridor where it isn't needed anyway. In the entrance to the en suite the solution is just a slightly smaller-than-standard door. Really, the amount of space required here depends on the dimensions of the shower tray. Research indicates that 800mm is the norm for one of these, and the minimum width of a door is 610mm, so that should leave us plenty of space to play with, though some bespoke carpentry might be involved.

This has gone off to the project manager in the last few minutes and, in conjunction with the things we discussed yesterday, should allow for a new and finaller set of drawings to be produced. I'll post them here when they arrive.