New bathroom - dos and don’ts!

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We’ve finally got the money together for a new bathroom. Our whole house has been a renovation project for the last 2 years and it’s the last room that needs doing. It’s a standard, small family bathroom with a shower over the bath. (No room for a separate bath and shower).

If you love your bathroom or if you’ve recently had it re-done, is there anything you’d recommend? We’re already noticing things we wish we’d done in other rooms, and I’m keen not to make the same mistake this time!

E.g. we have really hard water so I’m thinking of sticking to lighter colours/whites and wondering if it’s worth having panelling instead of tiles?

Hit me with your ideas!

I suppose the panelling must be a lot easier to keep clean than tiles and grouting.

Plastic strip sealant thing around the bath instead of silicone sealant.

Don't get black fittings (taps and shower heads). They look great to begin with but don't age well (well, ours didn't).
If you're getting slate flooring, don't go cheap. Get good quality slate - Welsh slate is great (avoid the cheaper shipped in stuff you get at tops tiles).

As above, don't get black fittings.

-Spotlights
-Large heated towel rail
-Taps in the sink, try and get one that mixes hot and cold. Sounds bizarre but having one tap hot and one tap cold is pretty useless apart from brushing teeth. Any medium water temp needed requires filling the sink up

• consider the distance between the toilet and the sink. I find bathrooms where the sink is the other side of the room annoying but that's completely personal.

Thanks - we were looking at black taps/shower and weren’t sure how well they’d age in a hard water area!

I’m not a fan of the panelling stuff- my in-laws have it and it doesn’t look great. Go for big tiles though. Big tiles= more shiny easy to clean surface and less grout for mould to stick in.
My bathroom has floor tiles that look like antiques that used to be white. This has turned out to be an excellent way of disguising actual dirty floor.
Also, flat surfaces are good. It used to drive me mad that there was nowhere I could put anything down. Now I have the loo and basin in a unit, so there’s a nice big surface on top. Much better.

Best tip would be placing low level LED lights into the skirting board, on a separate switch. Perfect for night time loo visits because you can see but don't properly wake up by being light blared. Kids love it. And they're inexpensive if you do it with a refurb - it's inserting wiring after the fact that can get expensive.

Are you having one of those square sinks with no pedestal. I managed to catch my fitter as he was just about to install one that was far too small. Compared to a traditional round basin on a pedestal they come up really small, nothing worse than trying to wash your face and water going all over the floor so make sure you check that the bowl is a decent size

Watching with interest. We're more in the position that we have money to do these things, but are too idle to get on with sorting it out.

Hence living for 15 years in a house with a bathroom that was fitted probably in the 1980s, so is very dated, but sadly good quality so nothing wrong with it, apart from it looks like an old person's bathroom.

We've just had a minor leak and while he was fixing it, DP started going on about how we could get a new bathroom and nice shower cubicle. He soon changed his mind when he started looking into how much these things cost.

I find bathrooms where the sink is the other side of the room annoying but that's completely personal

If the OPs bathroom is anything like ours, that would not be an issue. You could wash your hands without having to move from the toilet should you wish to.

But to answer the OPs questions, watch the size and shape of the sink. Some are too small and/or shallow to be used for the sole purpose for which they are designed.

...re the black taps thing again. I'm sure there is a way to look after them better than we have but we're in a hard water area and the limescale looks terrible on them. Plus, I'm not a natural Mrs Hinch type

We have black fittings in one bathroom and chrome in the others. I wouldn't say either is better or worse to keep clean tbh.

We have shower panels in one shower, they are really easy to clean and look great.

We've got fog free mirrors light up mirror cabinets with shaving points that we use for charging toothbrushes. They're really good. You just wave your hand under the mirror to turn the lights on.
Other things I love is built in storage, we have drawers under all the sinks, cut out shelves in the showers and storage built in for towels etc. It's so much easier to clean when everything is stowed away.

This is my bathroom. Love it, it's about 4 years old however the shower screen boils my piss. Constantly covered in water marks, I have to clean it daily or it looks awful. Looking back we should've gone frosted or similar as honestly I can't cope with looking at it covered in marks as soon as someone's used it!

We have done our bathroom recently. I love the underfloor heating . Also we had a shelf ingress (not sure that's the right word) so we have somewhere to put shampoo etc , but also a spotlight fitted in that .

Also we have a lot of storage , we have a cupboard under the sink , small cupboard attached to that to , then the toilet on the other side with a long double cupboard with shaving point inside.

If having a towel rail, make it clear to the installer whether you want feeder pipes chased into the wall or not.

For water pipes / connectors, ask whether will be plastic push fit vs copper pipes / metal flexihoses. You get what you pay for.

Driftgames, I bought a plastic 'scraper' from Ikea last time I was in there. Cost 50p. Wipe the screen off after showers and don't have the water marks.

Heated gloor if you can stretch to it, even if its only a few metres of it, so in areas where you stand, so coming out the bath, in front of thd sink. Its hands down my favourite thing in our bathroom!

Love the panelling. I'd never go back to tiles.
Had our first in 2005 and it is still going strong.

I wouldn't have a mixer tap in a sink - they are right in the way when you are washing your face.

Make sure the taps are long enough.

When we replaced our bathroom a couple of years ago, I didn't pay much notice but where the water comes out is too close to the back of the sink - they need to extend further.

@billyt that sounds great, I'll give that a go!

We had our floor tiles put down before anything else. It means that there is a lot less movement around bath/shower.

If you can afford to put in a water softner - makes cleaning bathrooms a breeze as virtually no limescale.

I wouldn't have a mixer tap in a sink - they are right in the way when you are washing your face.

DH says this but it's not an issue for me, I think we must wash in different ways!

Another vote for a Water softener. It takes all the old gunk out of your pipes too, not just preventing future build up on screens etc.

Don't have the extractor on the same switch as the light. SO annoying when the extractor comes on when you're just using the loo/cleaning your teeth/washing your hands.

Our best decision was to get an extractor which is also a spotlight, directly over the shower. It's on its own pull cord, so you can switch the extractor on just for a shower.

I hate light switches outside the room too - pull cords all the way for me.

And storage. Get storage! There's always a way.

Re the tap thing - you can get mixer taps that rotate. I think it must be a man thing - my DH was adamant we couldn't have a static tap over the sink, but it made/makes no difference to me. I think it must be to do with how they rinse their faces when shaving? I only use the sink for teeth and hand cleaning, so don't need to move the tap.

Not long had mine done. I also thought we didn't have space for a separate shower and bath. I was wrong. I turned it into a wet room with underfloor heating and added a Japanese soaking tub. I absolutely love the openness of the wet room. And I will never have a bathroom without underfloor heating ever again.
I also bought a cabinet with a sensor light, which is great for middle-of-the-night toilet trips or for low lighting while having a bath. It also has a charging point for shavers and electric toothbrushes. It's brilliant.