Charlotte is delighted with her extra bathroom
In the five years they’ve been living in their south London semi, Charlotte Rose and her husband Harry have never once used their garage for its original purpose. ‘When it was built back in the Fifties, cars were much smaller and now it’s just too narrow to take ours without scraping the sides,’ Charlotte explains. Little more than a storage area and workshop, it was a waste of space that the couple felt could be put to better use if it could somehow be incorporated into the house.
Another drawback of the property was that, although a decent size, it had just one bathroom containing the only WC in the house. ‘I had considered turning the cupboard under the stairs into a downstairs cloakroom but, when we looked into the cost, it seemed disproportionate with the end result and would have been tiny,’ says Charlotte. ‘That was when we decided to go the whole hog and steal some of the space in the garage to create a second bathroom with a walk-in shower.’ Not wanting to lose either storage space or access to the utility room at the rear, she decided to go for a ‘room within a room’, adding a shower room at the end of the garage with a narrow corridor down the side. ‘I realised this would mean having no window in the shower room, but the builder assured me that there would be adequate ventilation,’ says Charlotte.