To ask what bathroom mistakes you have made

[Egoanono]

Doing up the bathroom at the mo, ripping it out and starting from scratch. Mid range budget but want a high end finish. I'd love to learn from your mistakes (and successes! please.

Don't go to Bathstore - Plumb Store is good. Spend as much as you can on things like taps & shower fittings, but you can save money on the loo, sink etc. Keep costs down by saving on tiles (don't tile whole room - full height in shower, dado height in the rest of the room). Don't go for high gloss in a dark colour - shows every single water mark. Get plenty of storage. Get underfloor heating if you can afford it. Avoid shower curtain like the plague, they always make a bathroom look cheap, and feel disgusting if they touch your skin - shower cubicle or glass screen. Don't let your builders completely box anything in without leaving access hatches.

Don't put towel radiator too close to the toilet. Sounds obvious....but every time we go to the loo now when heating is on...ouch!

White high gloss tiles (with white grout) nightmare to keep looking good, every hair, every piece of fluff, dust or anything else show up. Especially my DH s dark hairs and white was his choice I wanted dark grey but then again he doesn't clean the bathroom.

That's floor tiles btw.

I regret buying cheap bathroom furniture from Soak. Our beautiful tiles don't look quite so nice next to a sink cabinet which looks like a wheely bin.
However we didn't have a lot of choice because the tiles were so expensive. (At Bathstore they're £110 per square metre but I bought them cheaper elsewhere. You need to see a whole wall to appreciate them.) www.bathstore.com/products/kensington-java-grey-brick-mosaic-305x305.html

And I wouldn't let DH even attempt the tiling this time... If you want the perfect finish ask a professional.

Hexagonal tiles. They look fabulous but what an almighty pain to tile. Every edge had to be cut as there's not a straight edge.

Worst bathroom mistake I ever made...falling asleep, drunk, having been violently sick, and waking up with my head on a Russian loo seat. Ew.

Definitely use shower panels instead of tiles in the shower - so much easier to keep clean and no grouting to sort out - reasonably priced too. We had some left over and our builder made a nice splashback for the sink.

Got our sink/toilet/shower cubicle & tray from BetterBathrooms.com and we were definitely on a tight (small) budget. If you use BetterBathrooms.com though, be advised that the shower feet do not come with the tray (why in heavens name they don't is beyond me)!

And definitely a cupboard of some kind!

1. Don't rely on a chrome heated towel rail to warm the room. They look nice and help dry towels but don't heat a room at all.
2. Electric underfloor heating is completely unreliable and will not work after the first 6 months despite repeated attempts to fix.

At least that's my experience. I have a very, very cold bathroom...

Thank you for this thread - we have 2 bathrooms that need complete renovation so I am eagerly taking notes

I haven't read all of the posts so may be repeating.

Don't get a glass sink. You will be forever wiping and polishing it as shows every drop of water and toothpaste.

If you plan on using anything with suction caps - such as shelves in shower etc. make sure you have smooth tiles, not stone.

Don't put stone tiles on floor. So cold!!

We have a fan heater in the bathroom (and underfloor). The fan is brilliant - you just put it on when you go for a shower and the room will be nice and toasty when you get out

Avoid those daft huge deep baths with lion law feet. They just collect dust underneath and use vast amounts of water.

I keep my electric toothbrush in an IKEA glass tealight holder. This works. Pinched the idea from a friends bathroom.

Oh I love my roll top bath! I'm definitely getting another one in my new house.

I've done up a few bathrooms recently on varying budgets. Victoria Plumb is great value and has some nice sink/storage units to hide stuff. If your budget stretches a bit further then I would always recommend Geberit loo cisterns, Duravit suites and crosswater taps/showers. Really good stuff! And always dark grout on the floor all it will look grubby quickly!

ALWAYS ALWAYS PLEASE!! buy a spare box of your tiles just in case, we get this week in week out where there has been a problem and people just need a couple of tiles and they're discontinued.

I loathe our roll top bath (put in by previous owners). Goes cold really quickly because it's enamel (give me quality plastic any day) and has got scratched by the kids swinging the plug against the sides. You can't balance shampoo bottles (or rubber ducks) on the rolled sides so have to have a cabinet/shelves next to the bath, which gets dripped all over. Daft small kids are forever standing up under the roll top and banging their heads or scraping their backs. It's also a bugger to clean underneath. And someone is always stubbing their toe on the claw feet. Hate it.

Echoing just - get spare tiles and leave them for the next owners if you move..even if they are plain white 'bog standard' tiles ...there is no such thing really - you can shove a box/part of a box under the bath...
I had ONE broken white tile on a bath splash back of a house we bought - after visiting every tile place in a 50 mile radius trying to get one the 'right' white and even the best match looked really bad I thought I'd add a few coloured tiles as a feature and rescue one of the replaced white tiles to match the broken edge one...after a couple of failures I did manage to get one ok ....then broke another removing the last white tile...yep after all that faff had to replace the whole lot anyway ....

POp up plugs break. Always.

Those big overhead rain shower heads are overrated, the moveable ones are better.

Agree that you need to check every day (twice a day if possible) and point out anything you are unhappy with.

I want one of those Japanese tubs.

Not a mistake we made, but our toilet is so close to our bath that we cannot tighten the screws on the new seat we bought which means it wobbles constantly and slips. When previous owners did it I imagine they fitted it before the bath, when we tried to replace it we've never managed to get it tight enough. I have literally wept tears of frustration trying to do it and have lived with it for 6 years.

Yep unlucky white is not white. Matching never works. And we get soo many customers that replace the whole thing.

Here's my tip: make sure you have a shower attachment thingy on the bath taps.

We got a seperate shower cubicle fitted, and a freestanding bath, so I thought I only needed taps on the bath. Got lovely wall-mounted mixer taps for the bath. Didn't think I'd need the shower attachment thing.

It's a right pain in the arse cleaning the bath without one.

Ikea sinks. I love mine. Has two massive drawers underneath which are so much better than cupboards and really reasonable!

No waterfall taps.

Fixed shower heads are good but you must also have a smaller head on a hose. Essential for cleaning.