I have been thinking about how to maximize the floorspace in my 1973 31' AS when I redo the interior. It was pretty much gutted when I got it so I need to rebuild the entire interior from scratch. That means I can change things around if I can find better ways to arrange things. Of course I am still constrained somwhat by the location of windows, wheel wells and etc. I have been thinking about how to make the bathroom a bit more roomy and hit on a "crazy idea" that upon further reflection may not be that crazy afterall. I submit the following proposal for comments and feedback...
My AS was originally a mid-bath model. I want to put at least a queen size bed in the back oriented length-wise in the floor plan. I still intend to have the bath in the middle area. What I am thinking about doing is to modify the floor plan so that the vanity/sink is on the street side (under the existing window) and the toilet is on the curb side directly opposite the vanity. There would be doors of some sort both at the front and back of the bathroom area just described. Now here is the interesting part:
I want to build a shower underneath the end of the queen size bed.
It occurred to me that when the bedroom is not in use that there is a lot of space that is not very well utilized. It also occurred to me that it would not be a particularly serious issue if the bedroom could not be used when the shower was in use. So I am thinking about fixing the end of the bed so that it will fold back and expose a large shower pan placed in the end of the bed close to the bathroom. The idea is to have some sort of shower curtain that surrounds the shower on the bedroom side that would prevent any water from getting out of the shower into the bedroom. I suppose it could be obscure to help with privacy but it would also be easily possible to just close the bedroom curtains when the shower was in use. The curtain would just need to be lifted up and fastened to hooks in the bedroom ceiling. The fan in the middle of the bedroom ceiling could probably be used as a shower exhaust fan - I have not looked at its exact location in the room relative to this but I think that would probably be OK.
There are, of course, a lot of little details to work out with the approach. I think that I have most of the issues already figured out in my mind but I didn't want to share all of the details at first. Instead I wanted to get some healthy discussing going to see what others think of the idea.
Malcolm