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 some or all of your basement. Maybe a family room or game room would be nice, maybe 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 to have to run upstairs every time a bathroom is needed, so you’ll definitely want to add a basement bathroom to your remodeling plans.

Before you start choosing plumbing fixtures and ordering your RTA vanity cabinet, you must 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 house is fairly new, there’s a chance that the builder may have placed plumbing fixtures for a future basement bathroom in your concrete slab. The water supply lines are generally not too difficult to extend to the base bathroom location, but the drain lines are another matter. If you’re lucky, the toilet drain line will connect and plug above the slab surface and the tub or shower drain will also be in place. 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 may be a good idea before your plans stray too far.

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 house slab in relation to your future bathroom, you may need to cut away a large portion of the slab. A plumbing contractor can help show you the most profitable location for your bathroom if this is your situation.

sewer lift
If the main sewer line leading out of your home is above the elevation of your future basement bathroom, you will need to install a sewer ejector pump for the drain to work properly. This isn’t the end of the world and many basement bathrooms have them, but they can add significant cost to your remodeling project. This is another issue where consulting with a professional plumbing contractor may help.

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