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.

Has anyone said the obvious yet? Ditch the great British tradition and DON'T GET SEPARATE HOT AND COLD WATER TAPS!

And none of this business with the sink taps being so close to the back wall of the sink that you can't put your hands underneath them to wash them.

Don't get a double-sided mirrored cabinet - moisture gets in between the 2 mirrored panes and looks shit after a while - must be mould or something. Annoying as we paid a lot for it - got lights and a shaver point etc.

"DON'T GET SEPARATE HOT AND COLD WATER TAPS"

they're great!

a mixer only works if the pressures are the same. If you have a loft tank it might or might not be (but can be made so).

Put your thumb on the spout to see.

As a pp said, not all toilets flush the same, though I don't know how you can check before purchase. Also try to get as smooth a toilet pedestal as possible (possibly also wall-mounted). Ours is a cheap standard white porcelain, but with 2 boys in the house I Seem to always be cleaning around the base & where the bolts hold it to the floor with an old toothbrush, as wee seems to go everywhere. We went for white tiles & grout (Cillit Bang keeps it white) and a dark grey vinyl floor, which is warm. Having a small bathroom, a towel rail is sufficient to heat it (though I still wish we'd installed underfloor heating).

Don't get tiles in the shower cubicle - get shower panels instead. No grouting to clean! Truly amazing. You can get them in all sorts of colours from Bushboard.

If you want some tiles somewhere put them above the bath and sink where the grouting isn't affected so much.

Brilliant thread. DeeDee, if you're still there - love your Omnitub. But I can't see any shower screen / curtain type thing. Do you use it mainly as a bath? Is it a bit too deep to be handy as a shower?

Don't use real stone tiles, they are too impractical when it comes to cleaning. Just opt for ceramic or porcelain tiles instead.

If you have pale tiles on the floor, don't use pale grout, as it gets dirty very quickly and is difficult to get clean. Instead use a grey grout.

Sara, we don't need a shower curtain/screen as the tub is so wide and deep the splashes don't make it as far as the floor!

We'

We've got a rainfall circular shower thing centred above the onmi tub and a flexible hose. Love how I can open the window into shower cubicle, on sunny mornings i

Love my under floor heating, demisting mirror, shower panels instead of tiles, large shower cubicle, tall cupboard as well as under sink storage,shower with a flexible hose. Wish I had a dimmer switch.

Underfloor heat - even in a small bathroom. We had a tiny bathroom and regretted not getting it.
So in our next house we did.

We got a mixer tap for the sink which looks like a smaller kitchen tap - as the spout is moveable. This is great because the last mixer tap we had, when you went to rinse your face, it would get in the way.

A sink with proper sides - not a fancy sloping sides one. The sloping slides means that when you're swishing water about, it swishes out too easily.

Get sealer put around the bottom of the sink cabinet (if you have one) - we didn't and ended up with water getting in the body of the veneer cabinet which made it swell and buckle.

If you have a shower bath, put the controls in the middle of the long wall if you can. Then you don't have to reach around the screen to turn the shower on (if like me you like to put the shower on to let it warm up before you get in!)

I'd get
Seperate light and fan switches.
Dimmer switch.
Mirror with lights in.
Magnified mirror on a stretchy stand attached to wall next to lighted mirror.
Lights in floor tiles along Bath for mood lighting.
Towel radiator.

In our last house we had multiwall on all the walls instead of tiles and the bath panel was made if it as well. It was amazing! Totally waterproofr, no grouting to go mouldy, and looked really good after 18 years. (when we sold one viewer commented that"of course, the bathroom is new". It really wasn't, just very easy to keep clean). Aqualisa showers -really powerful and a company who put a lot of effort into after care. I like quaryl (ours was from villeroy and botched) or similar for baths. Warmer than enamel or porcelain but much tougher than plastic!/acrylic baths. We also had a hansgroghe exafill which was great as a plug and waste system and for trickling more hot water into the bath while you're in, but pants for filling it, even with a pump fitted. We always used the shower instead to fill the bath. Biggest mistake was fitting a single tap over the small basin which looked lovely but was in middle and didn't move so you couldn't wash your hair in the basin and it got in the way when dh was shaving.

Biggest shower cubicle you can fit in.

Old-fashioned plug and chain- nothing else works for very long.

Loads of storage- we got all of ours from a local plumbing supplies place that had Roper Rhodes cabinets etc. To get what we wanted we have three of them in a row under the window and our builder cut matching worktop to fit on top.

Check length of cable for electric toothbrush chargers and location of shaver socket. Ours wouldn't reach to an overhead light/socket so we have an extra shaver socket installed under the basin.

Our new flat has a very trendy sink with a flat bottom. The flatness means the water never fully drains away and limescale develops in 3-4 days. I keep a bottle of vinegar in the bathroom and spray and wipe it out every day or two but it would be so much easier to have a traditional rounded bottom to the sink.

Wet rooms are a good idea ! Just make sure the floor slopes in slightly towards the drain. Underfloor heating would be a feather in the cap

I absolutely hate wet rooms!! I prefer my showers to be enclosed. There's nothing worse than having to step on a wet floor to get to a wet toilet after someone has had a shower.

Contrary to what others have noted, I love my overflow bath filler. We have a shower over bath and shower daily but only have a bath occasionally. The advantages of having a clear surface with no taps on the bath edge for keeping clean, outweighs any disadvantages of a bath taking a bit longer to fill (we have a combi anyway so it was never all that fast even with conventional taps)

I think for most people there are always going to be compromises so it's about the balance, e.g. a separate shower and bath is imo always preferable, but if, as in our case, that would involve major structural work, new windows, moving doorways etc. then you've got to consider whether what you gain is worth the outlay.

So I love my back to wall toilet, sink unit with drawers and my bath filler operated via the shower controls.

Mistakes were not thinking about height of combined shower/bath controls. Not going for a digital shower mixer which would have been a lot less work and would have meant we didn't have to rebuild the airing cupboard. Not a lot else I would change, it's not perfect but within the constraints of the room it came out pretty well.

Electric underfloor heating is completely unreliable and will not work after the first 6 months despite repeated attempts to fix.

Electric underfloor heating works really well in my experience but the thing is, which people don't get told, is that you're not supposed to turn it off ever, just turn it down low in the summer/when its not needed. Always get one that has its own thermostat so you can do that.

"you're not supposed to turn it off ever,"

Why?

OdeToAutumn, I put my electric toothbrush in an upside down lid, about an inch across. Think it came off something like this.
www.boots.com/en/No7-Beautiful-Skin-Foaming-Cleanser-for-Normal-Oily-Skin-150ml_1545068/

I'd second underfloor heating; not only lovely underfoot but much more efficient at heating an exposed bathroom.

We got our bathroom tiles from www.al-murad.co.uk/.

There are many more showrooms in the north of england, so if you're further south you might have to travel further.