If your family is expanding or you’ve decided to stay in your home for a few more years until the housing market stabilizes, you may have decided to finish off part or all of your basement. Perhaps a family or game room would be nice, perhaps with a big screen TV and state of the art audio system for watching movies and your favorite sports team or an area with a pool table and wet bar for when the friends and guests visit. Of course, you don’t want everyone having to run upstairs every time a bathroom is needed, so you’ll definitely want to add a basement bathroom to your remodel plans.
Before you start choosing plumbing fixtures and ordering your RTA vanity cabinet, you should first find out if a basement bathroom is feasible; It’s not as easy as putting up four walls.
Preliminary plumbing work in the basement
If your home is fairly new, there’s a chance the builder may have placed the plumbing fixtures for a future basement bathroom on your concrete slab. Water supply lines are usually not very difficult to extend to a basement bathroom location, but drain lines are another matter. If you’re lucky, the toilet drain line will be plugged and plugged above the tile surface and the tub or shower drain will be in place as well. When those are there, there’s usually not a lot of work involved in adding the toilet, shower, and vanity. However, if you live in an older home or don’t have these issues, calling a plumbing contractor for advice might be a good idea before your plans get too far off the beaten path.
It may still be possible to add a bathroom, but you may not want to know the costs. Depending on where the drain lines are located under the home’s slab in relation to your future bathroom, you may need to cut a large portion of the slab. A plumbing contractor can help show you the most cost-effective location for your bathroom if this is your situation.
sewer lift
If the main sewer line leaving your home is above the elevation of your future basement bathroom, you’ll need to install a sewer jet pump for proper drainage. This isn’t the end of the world and many basement bathrooms have them, but it can add significant cost to your remodeling project. This is another problem where consulting with a professional plumbing contractor can be helpful.
