Room by Room
A Bath And A Shower Ask The Room For Different Things
Baths need floor area and structural support, showers need drainage depth and enclosure, and a room that suits one may be poorly shaped for the other.
Fitting both a bath and a shower into one room is the standard aspiration and the standard compromise. The two make different demands, and the room usually favours one.
A bath is a load as much as a fixture
Filled and occupied, a bath is one of the heaviest concentrated loads in a domestic building, and it sits on a small number of feet.
On a suspended timber floor that load needs to be spread or supported, particularly where it runs parallel to the joists rather than across them.
Older cast-iron baths add considerably to that weight before any water is in them, which is why moving one to an upper floor is not simply a lifting problem.
A shower is governed by what sits below the tray
The outlet is close to floor level, and beneath it must fit a trap and the beginning of a fall towards the waste.
That vertical requirement is easy on a timber floor with a void beneath and very awkward on solid ground-floor construction.
Where the depth is not available the tray rises, and a step into a shower is a compromise that becomes less welcome as a household ages.
Enclosure is about splash paths, not neatness
Water leaves a shower at an angle and travels further than expected, and any unsealed junction in its path will eventually admit it.
The junction between tray and wall is the critical one, because it is the point where the two materials move relative to each other.
Over a bath the same logic applies with more movement, since a bath flexes as it fills and empties, which is why sealant there has a short life.
The room shape suits one or the other
A bath needs a run of clear wall of a fixed length, and rooms narrower or shorter than that cannot take one without rearranging everything else.
A shower needs a smaller footprint but wants to be clear of the door swing and away from the position where somebody stands to dry.
Trying to satisfy both in a small room frequently produces a bath with a shower over it, which is a genuine solution rather than a failure.
Use decides more than resale arguments
Households with small children generally use a bath daily and a shower rarely, and the pattern reverses within a few years.
Since a bathroom is refitted perhaps twice in a lifetime, planning for how the house is used now, with the drainage capacity to change later, is the more durable approach.
Questions readers ask
Does a boot room need heating?
It needs air movement more than heat. A little warmth helps drying, but without ventilation the moisture simply condenses somewhere in the house.
What if there is no space for one?
A bench, a run of hooks and a long barrier mat along one wall of a hallway does most of the work. The sequence matters more than the room.
