Now, let's shift down to take a look at the other upstairs bath. We intentionally placed it so that it shares a "wet wall" with the master bath, and reduces plumbing cost in our house. So, if we put a tub and toilet against the north wall of this bath, that leaves some of the west wall and the south wall for a sink, or two. It might make sense to place 2 sinks in cabinets along the south wall. That way more than one child can attend to their "duties" at the same time. It might lead to reduced contention over bathroom time (though I know better). However, before we do all this, let's take a look at the original plan, to see what we did, there.
Hmmm, in that plan it seems we didn't follow the proposed layout. The tub was placed along the west wall, and a sink was placed along the north wall, next to the toilet. Why, I wonder, would we do this? Well, I know why, but let's make some measurements to see exactly how much space we have, north to south in this bath.
The bath is 6'6" (78") tall. The tub is 32" deep, and the base cabinet is 24" deep. Out of the 78", this leaves only 22" between the tub and the front of the sink. That's not going to be enough space. I'd think we need at least 28" so no one feels cramped. Given that this is a rather spacious bath, overall, let's try something different.
Let's place a tub (standard size) along the west wall, and perhaps only one sink along the north wall.
So, now that we know how we're going to outfit this bath, let's place our tub, sink, and toilet in this bathroom. The sinks we placed in the master bath seem also appropriate for this bath, so select one sink cabinet in the master bath and copy it into this second bath. Also copy the toilet from the master bath. Select the standard size tub/shower enclosure from the library, and place it where shown.
OK, so far, so good. We're definitely not cramped for space, but we do have some unusable space at the north end of our tub. This is not a problem, though. We could choose to fill this space with a soffit, or better yet we could fill this space with both a soffit and a wall cabinet, or maybe some shelves.
If you have visited some of my other pages, such as this one where I discuss some of the interesting characteristics of the soffit object, you may know that the soffit is quite an all-purpose geometric solid. It is very handy and useful in many ways, not the least of which is that it can be stretched and positioned almost infinitely, and it can hold moldings and take any material you want. If we look at the definition of "soffit", we find the following:
Interesting. I'd say the definition has been somewhat "expanded", since the soffit object goes way beyond being simply the underside of something.
What we're going to do is fill the void in the northwest corner of our bath. Not with a wall, though that can be done, but with a soffit. We will look at what we've done, and then we'll decide if we want more in the bathroom, such as shelves for storing towels and such.
To place a soffit, select the Cabinet Tools tool, then the Soffit child tool. Simply click in the general area where you need some space filled. The soffit I inserted is inside the red circle in the screenshot, below.
By default, soffits are 12" deep, 24" wide, 12" high, and are positioned 12" below the ceiling. This reflects their use in kitchens, where they often fill in the space above the kitchen cabinets.
Select this soffit, and set its height to 97 1/8 (or whatever the height of your ceiling is, in your plan), its depth to 18, its width to 36, and floor to bottom to zero.
Below is the result. There are no crown moldings on our soffit, but that's because we don't have any in our plan (yet). If we had crown moldings (and base moldings) the soffit would have both of them.
But, what's this? Our tub seems to have sunk into the floor. Actually, since it's sitting on the floor, some of the floor material shows through the tub bottom. The simplest solution to this problem is to select the tub (click on it in the image) and open its specification dialog box. Set the Floor To Bottom number to 1/8" (or something small like that) and click OK. Now the tub won't appear to be embedded in the floor. And we have a nice, pretty image like that, below.
So, what do we do from here? Well, let's see what some nice shelves might look like. We may also want to move the sink away from the from of the tub, a small distance, so we aren't as cramped getting in and out of the tub.
But the question now is: how would we go about putting in shelves? And more than that, where will these shelves be? They can't face the wall of the tub. That must mean they would face toward the sink. Hmmm, that might work. The only problem is how to do it.
We have a shelf object. It's a child tool on the Cabinet Tools tool set. So, we know we can make a shelf. But, how do we modify our soffit so it can contain some shelves? Well, the short answer is that it can't. We will have to move our soffit out of the way and put in other soffits to make a cut-out to hold our shelves.
Here's what we do:
We can now fill this space with some shelving. I'd put a shelf at 57 1/4", 69 1/4", and 81 1/4" (basically 12" apart, 12" from the bottom of our shelf alcove. The end result is shown below.
To make a shelf, click on the Cabinet Tools tool, then the Shelf child tool. Place a shelf in the bathroom, somewhere, and adjust its width and depth to fill the space. I made mine 1" less deeper than the alcove. Then copy the shelf, and change the Floor To Bottom setting appropriately. For a third shelf, repeat the process and change the Floor To Bottom, again.
We could do more, but for now this completes our bath. We can always come back and fill in more details (such as towel bars, etc.), but we want to wait until almost everything is exactly where we want it.
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