®Boxing in isn’t an advanced part of bathroom design. It’s most of the job. When we looked at 321 real customer designs drawn in our own showrooms, 250 of them had something boxed in: 393 bulkheads and 111 pipe boxes between them.
Here’s how to think about the three you’ll draw most.
Pipe boxes
A pipe box hides a soil pipe or stack, usually running floor to ceiling behind or beside the WC.
- Width: measure the pipe plus the batten and the board, not just the pipe.
- Depth: 200 mm is a sensible standard (more on why below).
- Height: full height, sitting on the floor.
Bulkheads
A bulkhead boxes across the top or along the bottom of a wall: pipework, a stair bulkhead, a cistern. The detail people get wrong is height off the floor. A bulkhead that runs along the top of a wall needs a gap underneath it. Draw it sitting on the floor and the elevations and tile count after it are wrong.
Why a pipe box and a bulkhead should share a depth
Where a bulkhead runs into a pipe chase, the two faces have to sit flush. If one is 150 mm deep and the other 200 mm, they miss each other by 50 mm and the join shows. Keep them both at the same depth unless the survey gives you a reason not to.
Slopes: rooms in the roof
A sloping ceiling eats into what you can put where: shower heads, mirrors, tall units. Measure where the slope starts on the wall and how far it runs out into the room. If you have slopes at both ends of a room, check they can both fit on the wall at the size you’ve drawn.
Boxing in changes the tile order
A box is a surface like any other wall, and it gets tiled or panelled. That has two consequences:
- Its faces add to the tile area. Add a box after the tiles were counted and the box count moves.
- Its outside corners need trims (on tiles or wet-wall), so count them from the drawing, not as a fixed number per room.
How KBB Go does it
In KBB Go you right-click the wall and choose Add Wall, then pick Pipe box, Bulkhead or Slope. It drops straight in at a sensible size: a 200 mm-wide full-height pipe box, a bulkhead, or an 800 mm slope, sized so two fit side by side on an ordinary wall. Set the width, height, depth and the gap underneath (the datum), or drag it into place. If two boxes overlap, the list on that wall says so before you close. A box picks up the room’s tile automatically and is counted in the tile boxes, so the order follows the drawing.