More and more of the garden room projects we are featuring on The Garden Room Guide are incorporating toilet and shower room facilities making them truly self contained units at the bottom of the garden.
Where as a few years ago garden rooms where being used as home offices and occasional rooms, more and more buyers are seeing their potential as more permanent forms of accommodation.
A poll on The Garden Room Guide found that 40% of buyers were looking to use their garden room as a bedroom – this could just be an occasional guest room, a space for older children or as a granny annex or holiday lets. Toilet and shower facilities are pretty much a necessity for a garden bedroom. We are also seeing a growing number of shower rooms being included in garden office projects, keeping home and work life separate and offering a great deal of flexibility over the future use of the building.
Its actually fairly easy to add a shower room into your design, functional spaces can be created on small footprints so it needn’t steal a lot of space from your main room.
Toilets and shower rooms have to comply with Building Regulations, but if you are going to use your garden room for sleeping in – even only occasionally it will need to comply with Building Regulations anyway, and most suppliers are accustomed to designing and building to these standards and will handle the process for you.
There are two approaches to including toilets and shower rooms into garden rooms, and these vary between suppliers. Most design their WC and shower rooms to be connected to the mains drainage and water supply, whilst others use systems developed for caravanning where by chemical toilets and water tanks are used. Obviously the first option is more work and in turn more expensive than the second option, but you’ll end up with facilities like in your house.
You have all the same choices in a garden room shower room that you have in your home, for sanitary ware, tiles, heating and lighting, and how much you spend will depend on the quality of the fitments you choose.
How the water for the sink and shower is heated varies from supplier to supplier, some install boiler systems such as combi boilers or pressurized systems which create great showers, whilst others use electric showers that heat the water as its drawn, they use a similar system for water for the sink.
