Laundry/Bath Re-no Inspiration

It's been raining non-stop in Omaha for the last week or so. I think in one night alone we got something like four inches. That's fantastic and all, but eventually the ground stops absorbing the rain and it ends up elsewhere. Like in our basements.

Our retaining wall started losing mud last weekend. Well, the end of the retaining wall slopes towards the house - more specifically the basement door - so the mud followed. Unfortunately, the door doesn't have a threshold under it (no particular reason why) and all the mud ended up in our basement. This weekend my dad is coming over and we're installing a threshold, adjusting the door so it doesn't stick anymore, and replacing the lock and deadbolt.

This has me all amped up to start doing work on the house. You know, all the stuff we said we were going to fix when we moved in and then never started on. I'm assuming everyone has one of these lists... I hope. Make me feel better and say that you do.

One of the big things we want to correct is the fact that the house only has one bathroom. All the plumbing is in the laundry room for the second bathroom, but there aren't any fixtures. Actually that's not true. There's a toilet in the laundry room which I have used exactly once since living in the house. It's the most horrifying looking toilet in the world. It's clean, I know because I've cleaned it... but it doesn't look clean. It's dingy and green and freaky.

At first we wanted to put up a wall to separate the bathroom from the laundry room, but I think that's going to make the bathroom too small. It might also block access to the heater and water-heater. Instead now I think we're going to go with something like this:



This is pretty much the layout of our room. We have white machines and large white storage cabinets in the laundry room so this is almost exactly what I want our room to look like. I found some affordable and stylish fixtures at (where else) IKEA that would work great since there isn't a ton of space between the washing machine and the wall.



They also have some cool red room dividers that I'd like to get to hide the heater units from view.

Assuming that the plumbing in the room is good and doesn't need major work, I'm thinking that we might be able to fix up the whole room for less than $700. Not too bad! My only concern is that it won't be considered an actual bath when we eventually sell the house. We're counting on this to help add some value since we currently only have one bathroom. I read that adding a second bath to a one bath home can add as much as 20% to the value of the house. I don't expect that much, but I'd like to see something for our efforts. Does anyone know about the technicalities of what is considered a bathroom?