How to Add a Bathroom to a Home

The addition of a new bathroom in your home requires a complex series of choices on your part. You need to add a bathroom that connects to existing pipes while fitting the room's design scheme to the rest of your house. It is important to plan correctly and hire the right contractor when you add a bathroom to your home.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Mark off spare space in your attic or basement to add a new bathroom to your home. Bathrooms can be constructed with a small amount of space, and a bathroom hidden away in another part of the house decreases congestion in common areas.

2. Establish a building budget and create a bathroom that adds value to your home. You should construct a full bathroom with new fixtures instead of a half-bath or powder room to increase resale value in the future.

3. Connect your toilet, sink and shower head in your new bathroom before you proceed to small accents. You need to shut off your water temporarily to hook up bathroom appliances without creating a mess.

4. Hook up an exhaust fan in the ceiling of your newly constructed bathroom if it is an interior room. Exhaust fans help pull steam and condensation out of a bathroom after showers to decrease mold and other material accumulation.

5. Choose between a shower stall and a shower-and-tub combination as you construct another bathroom in your home. Bathrooms that are used by guests on an infrequent basis should have a corner stall to decrease building costs.

6. Match your bathroom tiling to paint, shower and counter colors as you complete your new room. You can decrease the time spent laying down tiles by using larger squares instead of elaborate rectangular or circular patterns.

7. Indulge your love of accent pieces and delicate designs with your bathroom light fixtures. You can select a hanging light with a modern aesthetic and matching lights surrounding the mirror for a futuristic bathroom.

8. Maintain an open walking space in your bathroom, and store all of your necessities with built-in storage. You can carve out wall space and use a large area under the bathroom counter to avoid blocking access to the shower and toilet.

Tips & Warnings

• Share a wall in your new bathroom with another bathroom, kitchen or garage to save on the expense of pipes. You can connect your sink, shower and toilet to the same pipes used by other rooms in your home to avoid tearing up multiple walls. This is a simple way to run a small amount of additional pipe to your water source.