Builders - bathroom suggestions needed

Hey guys, Fiance CJ and I closed on our house this weekend. It's an older house (1920 construction), and the one full bathroom is very strangely laid out. Right behind it (back wall of the house) is a 2nd floor...porch? it's an extra bump out, maybe 3' deep by 5-6' wide. It has a noticeable slope away from the house.

(The 1st floor part used to be the exit from the house to the backyard but previous owner converted it to a bathroom)

The bathroom itself is good sized, but awkward in layout.  We're looking for the best possible way to reorganize the bathroom, and wondering whether that could include bumping out into the "porch" to gain space, as it's not really a usable room otherwise. 

Any suggestions or tips here? We'd like to move the tub/shower to take better advantage of the space. We'd be doing a good bit of the work ourselves/with the help of Fiance CJ's dad. 

Edited to add picture of the back of the house: 2nd floor with all the windows is where the room is!

Tear it all out, and a solution will present itself!

Honestly, it is hard to tell from your pictures what is going on. Not to be critical. 

You'll have to design from the plumbing up. Is there another bathroom to use while this is in process? 

The horrors that potentially await are not to be understated, but, it is just wood, pipes and drywall. 

Do you have to tear ceilings below out to rearrange? Is a tub necessary? Stall showers save a lot of space.

I hope this is somewhat helpful. Home improvement is no joke, but with diligence, you can get there.

Good luck, friend.

Stainless steel walls, ceiling and fixtures.

Tile floor and a floor drain.

Time to clean it? Just turn on the hose!

Funny- our house is laid out very similar.  We had an extra room off the back which had a door on some extra room- theoretically, it could be a BR, but it was used as a closet room.  And the bath had a window to that room.

Given we had a tiny bath, we expanded out into the room- put a huge tub with a shower out there, a "desk" with drawers, and some heat.  The main room had a long countertop sink, and a toilet.  Very spacious (the room is L shaped).  It's been working really awesome for us for almost 25 years now.  But we had pro help for the the whole remodel.  Very worth the cost.  

And it helped we had a bathroom in the same extension before we had the house- so there was already some plumbing around.

In the same renovation, we put a washer and a dryer in the small "closet" room- since we had new plumbing in the area.   That was also an awesome add- no need to go to the basement for laundry.

1920s?  You are going to be dealing with cast iron, galvanized steel, copper, and lead drains.  On top of that, the first plumber probably bored the E36M3 out of those floor joists.  Move that tub more than 5 feet from the stack and you will need additional venting or wet venting from the sink.  No way of even guessing what is possible until you demo the bath and pull up the floor.  Good chance you are looking at removing the ceiling below and exposing the cast iron waste stack somewhere inside the first floor wall at a minimum.  I like doing old houses and can't stand new construction.  This is pretty much what I do every day.  Once you get involved in cast iron, it becomes real plumber type E36M3, and not just a weekend warrior thing.  Bet you even have some brass water piping in that house.

From the pics the bathroom looks perfectly fine IMO. Small but better than a lot ive seen. The small sun room is actually pretty cool as is

I’m not a professional so this is grassroots home remodel idea. If I’m reading the pics right, leave the tub etc. alone and remove wall behind tub to sunroom, wall off sunroom door. That BR door is not ideal opening in front of the tub so I’d install a sliding barn type door. 

Can you rotate the tub 90 degrees? Even if you put in a smaller one, that’ll open up the room enough to work much better as a bathroom.

Alright, i'm back - we've decided to commit to moving the tub (actually, a new tub - planning on free-standing) to the back wall and refinishing the bathroom! We're working on tearing it out now - walls and tub should be out in the next day and we can make a plan. Any advice here? 

Per TR8Todd, we'll  likely be working with Cast Iron pipes. We're still hoping to do as much of this as possible, so i'm hoping to learn as much as I can in the next few days to become expert enough to put this back together. 

Any words of advice or warning are appreciated. As always, hoping not to be a hack - but the bathroom is so horribly laid out right now that we felt we wouldn't really be able to move in and use it for a few years as is. From the pictures below, the tub should really rotate 90* and slide to the back wall, leaving the area under the window/to the right of the sink wide open. Expecting to have to try and put shut-off valves for the tub on the side with the back wall. Last picture is inspiration.

If you aren't going to reuse the existing tub, don't trash it - one like that is worth some coin, so you should be able to sell it.

My guess is that bumpout was a sleeping porch, that was a pretty common feature on houses of that era.  The first floor part could have been an open porch that got closed in at some point.

You can transition from Cast to PVC with no-hub clamps.  Just make sure you get a good square cut on the cast.  Use a sawzall with new demo blades.  Those cast iron blades are only marginally better.  Don't let the pipe shake violently while you cut.  The more demo you can do, the better.  If you do decide to drop back and punt to a real plumber, there is that much less work he will have to do.  Plus being able to see what you are up against, instead of just staring at a wall and imagining a worst case scenario is always a good thing.  Once you get into it, I can give you my phone number and you can call me any time.  If you have an i phone, we can face time and I can better see whats there.  Pretty much how I give estimates now to contractors.  Saves me from driving to jobs to "look" at it.   

May I suggest a plan?

Get some graph paper, and draw a simple plan of the layout to scale. Photograph the plan and post it here. 

Everybody in this thread is guessing. Your pictures simply don’t communicate what you are dealing with. 

Plus, a plan is just an all-around good idea. 

HD has a screw type snapper for cast iron in their rental department. It fits in some tight spots and may be easier than a sawzall, depending on what else is around the pipe. 

In reply to SVreX :

We've had our plan, but communicating it to internet friends is always harder! Here's the stuff, as laid out on graph paper. First is original, 2nd is what we're planning to do. Based on the description/pictures here, we're going to do our best to re-paint the exterior of and re-use the tub. It is (seemingly) original to the home, and the porcelain is really in pretty good shape overall.

Current Layout: 

The window/toilet spacing may be a little off from reality, but they're pretty close. 

Hope this helps clear things up a little bit! 

Move the vanity behind the door, opposite the window. 

Rotating the tub made the most sense to me. 

We had actually planned to leave the vanity as-is, location wise. If anything, I think we'll try and scoot the toilet  ~ 1 foot to the right, towards the window. 

Good news is the old plaster walls are coming out really well. We made awesome progress in a few hours of work yesterday. With the commitment to refinishing the tub that's in there, our sense of scope was reduced a little bit, which feels good. Another win, the paint on the outside of the tub doesn't have lead in it!

Today's goal is to finish removing the plaster, detach the last bit of plumbing from the tub, and see if I can get the tub to budge. I think it will need to get put on a wooden "cart" and shifted around a few times during our tile work, so the cart will (Hopefully) be an easier way to move it around. I'll post pictures tonight, but we will be hoping to find a new way to control the drain - it's currently a weird pole that needs to be lifted up/out for the tub to drain, and Fiance CJ is pretty grossed out by that - it also is just weird!

From your drawing it looks like the door opens right to the vanity. That’s why I suggested moving it, it’ll open up the room. I’d even be tempted to do a pedastal sink behind the door to maximize floor space. 

In reply to Steve_Jones :

I think I'd look into eliminating the door and going with something that wouldn't open into the room. Something like a barn door or a pocket door would probably be simpler to do than move plumbing for the vanity.

Needs a urinal

Actually managed to accomplish the goals I set for today! The tub is moved, the plaster/lath is all detached, and we've set where our electrical will go. I should be able to finish cleaning tomorrow, and begin to prep the tub for paint.

At the same time, I'm hoping to add insulation to the exterior walls, and go ahead and pick up some cement board for everywhere we'll be tiling - the back wall, and ~31" on each side wall will be getting subway tile. 

Next will be actually removing/cutting the boards from the subfloor on the wall where everything will be moving and seeing what it will look like to actually extend the plumbing. TR8Todd, I'm hoping to need your contact info this week yet! I do think the plumbing "feed" lines from the floor to the tap are copper/brass, but I'm hoping to chip away more of the paint to see for sure - also hoping to be able to unscrew them once I get under the floor. Depending on if/how they clean up it would be cool to re-use them.

Pics!

Painted feed lines..

Facing the vanity wall, Tubs old location

Facing the tub's new location/subway tile wall. Note the (now inactive) knob and tube feeding the sleeping porch.

Today was a long day - 6.5 hours after work. Hoping that as we dig in, we can bring that extra time commitment down!

I had a few brief phone calls with Tr8Todd the other day, which helped quite a bit! 

As we were talking, we figured that if our house had Brass pipe, it was time to replace them with Pex. As it turned out, we had Galvanized steel. We decided to replace anyway! I'm really glad we did - looking through some of the pipes, there's barely a pinhole of light coming through. Only obstacle we ran into in dropping the old pipe down was a fitting just above the basement sill plate. The opposite side of that wall is an entryway for the side door, and the plaster had bubbled out and been covered with paneling anyway - perfect spot for an access hole for a sawzall to cut above/below the offending fittings!

Got some connectiong pieces today. Hoping to move and "send" the plumbing to the new toilet location, and on to the area where the bathtub will be tomorrow. If I can do that and sort out a drain pipe from the tub to join the toilet drain, I can get at least part of the subfloor down. 

It's all progress!

Floor tile will be black, wall will be the white subway tile. Getting a gray-grout throughout.

Old cast iron is snapped and out! Hoping to get the no hub clamp tomorrow and start running. Also realized that the can light for the kitchen is in the way of the tub drain, so I'll probably spend the $30 to upgrade to one of the LED recessed Canless lights in place of the can light that's there now

Nice work, kid!

STM317 said:

In reply to Steve_Jones :

I think I'd look into eliminating the door and going with something that wouldn't open into the room. Something like a barn door or a pocket door would probably be simpler to do than move plumbing for the vanity.

I always avoid pocket doors in bathrooms when I can. The hardware is fidgety to use, privacy locks are awkward, you can’t swing it closed quickly behind you (when you REALLY gotta go), and the slides have a reputation for falling off the tracks, which are really hard to fix. They also require framing an opening twice as large as the door, and replacing drywall and plaster on BOTH sides of the wall (this may he structural work). An opening this big almost always also requires moving electric outlets. 

Barn doors are beautiful, and I have one on my powder room. But they don’t give a good sense of privacy when you’re in there. They have gaps of nearly an inch when closed, which are easy to see through. 

Alright guys, one last question here as I'm setting up the drain. The minimum P-trap size per local code (for a bathtub with/without standing shower fixture) is 1.5" so that's what I'll be doing, but I had planned on a 2" pipe from the P-Trap to a Wye at the no-hub clamp where the toilet comes in. 

My question here - the floor joists where the toilet/tub were mounted seem to be made/angled pretty specifically for those fixtures. Am I okay to drill a 2" hole through the 2x10 and run the new Tub drain through? I don't see much of a way around it but am hoping I'm not setting myself up for failure.

Thanks!

In this pic, tub will drain from the right (upper) to the left, where the cast iron pipe is snapped.