I have a one story home with an attic, and a crawl space under my home where the water pipes run. I am now remodeling my bathroom, and wish to prepare for a future remodel of my attic. It will eventually be a second floor.
I am working on the plumbing now. I want to run some pipes up to the attic, so I don't have to do it later. How do I go about doing that?

My bathroom is on the back right corner, and that is where the pipes will be running up into the attic. Do I just make a box enclosure to encase the pipes all the way up to the attic? like a tunnel? and how to I go about installing a drain up there? Is that something I have to prepare for, or can it wait?

thanks

 

The best way to prepare for the future second floor is to create a chase adjacent to your wet wall. A wet wall is usually where all your plumbing goes, vent and waste pipes, hot and cold water lines. This wet wall usually goes from the crawl space to the attic. Therefore, it will provide easy access to run plumbing up to the second floor. You don't have to run the pipes now to the second floor, just make sure there is access to it. Running hot and cold water lines will be easy from there. Your present main vent stack will become the waste pipe for the second floor and the main vent stack will run from there through the roof.

A chase is very similar to the wet wall except for the plumbing. Basically all it is a wall cavity that runs from the crawl space to the attic. The size of it depends on what you intend to run upstairs when you finish it. For example, if you intend to connect to a furnace to heat and/or cool upstairs, this chase is going to fairly large and you'll probably need more than one. If it's a hot water system, no larger than the wet wall. You'll probably have to run a conduit up through the wall chase is you're going to run your electrical lines with heating pipes. Just in case the pipes did leak, the electrical lines would be protected.