Looking for advice on creating a shower room.
Background: we have a back room off our kitchen which isn't doing much at the minute. Wanting to divide it in two with a partition and put a shower, toilet and sink in one half. Not much headroom: 210cm. Currently laminate over concrete floor, I assume. The room is next to boiler, and the external wall is where all the existing waste pipes are.
The only joiner with availability/inclination to help is pushing back on two things:
- insulating the floor/external walls
- installing a pocket door
He argues that we'd lose too much headroom by insulating the floor. I was planning something like 50mm backer board followed by 6mm ply and some vinyl tiles. The shower drain would probably need routing into the backer board itself, because there wouldn't be enough headroom for a plinth. His preference is to use a plinth to facilitate future access (a benefit which our upstairs shower doesn't enjoy).
For the walls, I was thinking of taking off the existing dot and daub, adding insulation then replastering, hopefully hiding shower services within this. His solution is to add a new stud wall behind the shower to accommodate the shower services, without any additional insulation.
His solution to the pocket door is to hide a barn-style sliding door behind an additional partition, meaning one half of the new partition wall will be much wider than the other. I'm worried this won't give us any sound-proofing compared to a proper pocket door system. It also takes up valuable space in general non-bathroom part of the space.
Not sure what our options are - we could attempt some or all of it ourselves, with help from family, but would rather just get it done. If we find another joiner, are they likely to have similar opinions, or is this guy being unreasonable? Happy to make compromises, but don't want to spend £thousands on something we won't be happy with...
Background: we have a back room off our kitchen which isn't doing much at the minute. Wanting to divide it in two with a partition and put a shower, toilet and sink in one half. Not much headroom: 210cm. Currently laminate over concrete floor, I assume. The room is next to boiler, and the external wall is where all the existing waste pipes are.
The only joiner with availability/inclination to help is pushing back on two things:
- insulating the floor/external walls
- installing a pocket door
He argues that we'd lose too much headroom by insulating the floor. I was planning something like 50mm backer board followed by 6mm ply and some vinyl tiles. The shower drain would probably need routing into the backer board itself, because there wouldn't be enough headroom for a plinth. His preference is to use a plinth to facilitate future access (a benefit which our upstairs shower doesn't enjoy).
For the walls, I was thinking of taking off the existing dot and daub, adding insulation then replastering, hopefully hiding shower services within this. His solution is to add a new stud wall behind the shower to accommodate the shower services, without any additional insulation.
His solution to the pocket door is to hide a barn-style sliding door behind an additional partition, meaning one half of the new partition wall will be much wider than the other. I'm worried this won't give us any sound-proofing compared to a proper pocket door system. It also takes up valuable space in general non-bathroom part of the space.
Not sure what our options are - we could attempt some or all of it ourselves, with help from family, but would rather just get it done. If we find another joiner, are they likely to have similar opinions, or is this guy being unreasonable? Happy to make compromises, but don't want to spend £thousands on something we won't be happy with...
