When you’re planning a bathroom renovation, a common dilemma is whether the bath should stay or go. Even people who say they haven’t used their bath in years can become nervous at the thought of removing it, particularly if it’s the only one in the house. Many people have come to accept that a family home should have a bath, even if the family living there doesn’t actually use it. So, is it really a mistake to get rid of one? Here are a few things to consider before you decide.
How often do you use your bath?
Does anyone in your house actually take a bath? My sister has three sons, aged 10-18, and a bath with a shower fitted over it in their main bathroom. When the boys were younger, they used the bath all the time and she found it invaluable. Now that they’re older, they all shower – and the bath is rarely used.
Interestingly, she’s currently selling her house and has noticed that several of the people viewing it who have young children, or are thinking about starting a family, have been delighted to see a bath in the main bathroom. It’s a good reminder that what feels essential at one stage of family life can become almost redundant at another.
Our needs change as we get older too. Stepping in and out of a bath can become more difficult, so replacing it with a walk-in shower can be a more practical option. If you’re planning a bathroom you hope will work for you for many years, it’s worth thinking about how your needs might change, as well as what suits you now.
What you need to know when renovating your bathroom
Of course, if you love having a bath, there’s really no debate – keep it. But if nobody in the house uses it, it’s worth questioning whether you really need one.
What about a resale scenario?
My sister’s experience shows that resale benefit isn’t something we can dismiss. For families with babies or young children, having a bath can still be a selling point. But is the old advice that every family home needs one still true?
What buyers want has changed considerably, says estate agent Claire Connolly. In her experience, most now favour a large, spacious wet room over a bath.
Our increasingly busy lifestyles are part of the reason. For most people, showering is quicker, easier and better-suited to how we live now. Connolly says the main exception is buyers with babies or young children, who still see a bath as a practical advantage.
If you shower every morning and take a bath three times a year, you’re compromising the thing you use every day for something you use occasionally
At the higher end of the market, a free-standing or spa-style bath can also be a selling point, particularly where there is enough space for it to feel like a feature rather than something squeezed into the room. But in a typical home, Claire believes a generous wet room is now likely to have broader appeal. That certainly challenges the idea that removing a bath will automatically make your home harder to sell.
Of course, the type of property still matters, and I’d be more cautious about removing the only bath from a family home than I would from a house where there’s another bath elsewhere. But if you’re planning to stay in your home for years, it seems unnecessary to compromise a bathroom you use every day purely for an imaginary future buyer, particularly when that buyer may well prefer the shower too.
What is the best use of space?
The obvious solution, particularly in a small bathroom, is having a shower fitted over the bath. You get to keep the bath and still have somewhere to shower. Sometimes that works, but it’s worth asking whether trying to accommodate both is actually the best use of the space. In a small bathroom, it can be better to decide what matters most – and to prioritise that.
If you shower every morning and take a bath three times a year, you’re compromising the thing you use every day for something you use occasionally. A generous shower with good storage and enough space around it may ultimately be far more useful than a bathroom that ticks every box but doesn’t do any of them particularly well.
If you have more than one bathroom, you have much more freedom. Keep a bath somewhere in the house if you want one and design the other bathrooms around how you actually use them.
So, should the bath stay or go?
Before deciding, forget what you think a bathroom is supposed to have for a moment, and think about how yours is actually used. Do you take baths? Do you have young children in the house? Is it the only bath? How long do you expect to live there? Is there another bathroom with one? And, perhaps most importantly, what would you actually gain by taking it out?
If removing a perfectly good bath only gives you a marginally larger shower, it may not be worth doing. But if it allows you to rethink a cramped room and create a bathroom that works far better for you every day, that’s a different proposition.
We should consider resale when making significant changes to our homes, but our homes also have to work for us while we’re living in them. If you’re planning to stay for years, an imaginary future buyer shouldn’t automatically get the deciding vote.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether every home needs a bath. It’s whether yours does.