Master Bath

Placing Cabinets

Returning to the second floor, let's begin placing fixtures in our master bath. If you take a look at the similar Tract House I have already done, you should have a pretty good idea of where I'm going with this bathroom. Of course, as I've said many times, you are free to experiment with your own layout and style; my job is to show you how it's done.

Here's basically what we're doing in this room:

• Cabinets along the north wall. Two of the cabinets will contain sinks. We will make one cabinet into a bathroom vanity.
• A toilet in the southeast corner. I placed a 12" high soffit over the toilet.
• A tub/shower combination next to the toilet. This should fill up the space in the south wall.

Since we've already setup our cabinet defaults, let's begin by placing some cabinets along the north wall. We could fill the space with 24" cabinets, but usually I place sinks in wider cabinets. So ... let's begin by creating one cabinet and widening it to 36", then copying it a couple of times. The image below shows 3 - 36" cabinets in the master bath. I selected one of the cabinets.

Now, push the two cabinets on the right together. This will leave a rather large space in the middle, probably too large for our purposes, so we will need a narrower cabinet to fill in some of the space. OK, but first, let's put sinks in the left and right cabinets.

Placing Sinks, Toilet, and Tub

Click on the Library Browser tool (in the top row of tools, the icon is a set of library books), and you should see a dialog box similar to the following, except that I've expanded the Fixtures (Interior) tree, the Plumbing tree, and the Sinks tree (and the Bathroom Sinks and With Fixtures trees) to show the sink we want. The oval "built-in" sink, which is shown in the top of a cabinet. In fact, that's what we're going to do.

Select the Oval sink and minimize the Library Browser. Then, click in the top of the two cabinets to place sinks in each one. While we're at it, let's restore the Library Browser (click on the library books icon) and navigate to the Bathtub/Shower Combos tree and expand it. Select the Tub-Showers (large) tree and select the Right Tub-Shower. Now, click somewhere in the master bath (like, in the middle) to drop the tub in place.

Finally, do the same, but navigate to the Toilets tab, select either the Lowboy or Standard toilet, and drop it also in the master bath, somewhere. Don't worry about placement, these things can be easily moved around.

Now, click on the Select Objects tool to turn off "object insertion" mode.

Now our image looks like this.

Let's slide the toilet into the lower right-hand corner of the bath, against the wall. You may have to rotate the tub so that the side with the glass enclosure faces out. Place the tub (temporarily) against the southern bathroom wall, near the left end. There is a sizeable space leftover, and here is where the "tricky" part begins.

Zoom in until the toilet and the tub fill most of the screen. Now, get the Interior Wall tool and draw a piece of wall vertically to the left of the toilet. Like this.

Now, draw another, similar wall on the other side of the tub, extending the wall that's already there. Like this. You may need to move the tub in order to draw the wall, so ... move it.

Move the tub to the left until it snugs against the left-hand wall. Yes, I do intend for the wall to extend past the front of the tub. Now, drag the short wall by its center handle (there are 5 handles in each wall) until it snugs against the tub on the right-hand side. Like this.

What to do with the extra space between the wall and the toilet? No problem. Bathrooms can always use more shelf space or storage space for toiletries, towels, etc., so we will put some shelving (or perhaps a tall cabinet) to the left of the toilet. But first, let's finish with the sinks and cabinets.

Copy a 36" cabinet and place the new cabinet in the space between the other cabinets. Slide it over to the left so it snugs against the left-hand sink. Now, let's change this cabinet's properties to make it into a vanity. Select the cabinet and click on the Open Object icon.

Here are the steps we will be performing (and why):

1. Make both the Toe Kick Height and Depth 0" (zero). The new cabinet, which is nothing more than a counter with a drawer, doesn't need a toe kick.
2. Reduce the cabinet height to 8 1/2". Counter height 1 1/2" + 1/2" separation + 6" drawer + 1/2" separation = 8 1/2".
3. Change Floor to Bottom to 27 1/2" (because 8 1/2" + 27 1/2" = 36). We want this counter top to be at the same height as the other cabinets.

The Base Cabinet Specification dialog box with the changed settings is shown below. Click on OK.

Now we want to fill in the remaining space with a cabinet section. To do this, select the Cabinet Tools icon and click in the empty space between our vanity and the other cabinets. The program will fill the space with the largest (widest) cabinet at a standard width. We can leave it this way, or we can widen the cabinet to fill the space. That's what I usually do. Now, let's see what this looks like.

Not bad. But not done, yet. Let's move on to filling in the other upstairs bath.

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