Home Construction Improvement

Plan Your Future Basement Bathroom Before You Build

By Todd Fratzel on Basements, Bathrooms, Plumbing

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If you’re getting ready to build a new home then you should be planning a future bathroom before you begin construction. Today more than ever people are building living space in their basements to increase the available living space and value of their home. Having a basement bathroom is a huge bonus for the functionality of finished basements.

If you have even the slightest interest in a future basement bathroom then speak with your builder before construction begins. Whether you will build your home on a site with sewer or a septic system it’s crucial to plan that bathroom ahead of time and rough in the plumbing. This is true even if you’ll need to pump the sewage up in elevation if your basement is lower than the sewer lines.

I suggest to all of our customers that they rough-in plumbing for a vanity, toilet and shower. The last thing you want to do is jack hammer out concrete in the future to install the drain lines. In the adjacent photo you can see the vanity waste and vents for our future basement bathroom. Prior to construction I created a drawing showing the exact layout of a bathroom. This allowed the plumber to install the drain lines exactly where they will need to be in the future when I frame the walls.

In the second photo you can see a vent line (next to the insulation) and a square piece of blue board insulation. Under the blue board is the future shower drain. Typically we leave a boxed out section of concrete so the plumber can adjust the drain to fit exactly where the shower ends up.

This whole process probably only cost a few hundred dollars to do during construction. If I hadn’t done this, and wanted a future basement bathroom then I would need to jack hammer up the concrete to expose the sewer line, obviously MUCH more expensive than the few hundred dollars.

So make sure you plan any future basement bathrooms before you build your new home. This will certainly save you some money in the future.