Back To The Drawing Board, continued –
Now that we had a reality check on what our true interior footage was going to be in our shipping container home, it was time to get down to what we just couldn’t live without. Here it is, in very specific order 🙂
Priority #1 – The Bathroom
I am naturally claustrophobic, so a bathroom large enough to take a shower and get dressed in was at the top of my priority list. Oh, and don’t forget an INSIDE toilet and sink 😉 There is nothing worse than that ‘motorhome’ bathroom feeling, where you can barely turn around to flush the toilet. To accomplish this, I stole a foot from what would be our son’s room and 6” from the kitchen area, giving us an extra 18” in depth. Our bathroom was now 83” wide x 96” long – officially the largest single room in the house excluding the master bedroom.
The majority of this extra room was allocated to our custom corner shower. But, the extra 18” also allowed for some open floor space in the middle of the room and cupboards on the wall across from the fixtures. We use this extra cupboard space as our closet/dresser and added a little countertop to it to make the space functional as well.
Another functional design element that we added was a tankless hot-water heater. Most builds would hide the hot water heater in a closet, but truthfully, we don’t have any extra closets, so we just put it out there in the middle of the room, loud and proud 🙂 The hot water heater is 18” tall by 12” wide and adequate enough for a 3 bedroom apartment. More than sufficient for our home needs.
My bathroom fixtures were all pre-planned and chosen to help eliminate the wall to wall feeling of everything crammed together in a tiny space. I chose a pedestal sink in the bathroom that left some open space below it. While we may have lost a bit of storage without a sink cabinet, it is both fashionable and efficient. There is definitely not room to store a Costco quantity of toilet paper under our sink, but such is life when living in a tiny house – just a FYI ;). We also chose the smallest toilet footprint available to continue with the clean line look. If you are in the home building store and look at all the toilets side by side, ours is obviously rinky-dink. But, when it sits all by itself in our tiny home, it looks perfectly proportionate to everything around it and works as designed 😉
Our shower has been both our blessing and our curse. A corner shower tile shower was part of our original design, but later in our build when it came to actual construction, we struggled with my husband’s recent deficit from his bleed. The shower build ended up being used as part of my husband’s therapy after his brain injury (thank you occupational therapist for your great ideas). It isn’t perfect, but the sense of accomplishment when my husband completed it just 4 months after his brain bleed was amazing!
Overall, we are very pleased with how the #1 living space we couldn’t do without turned out in our shipping container home 🙂
that tiny life love 