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.

Deeedeee love it! I couldn't quite picture it in an English home but that looks fab. Our bathroom isn't really the right shape but I'd totally go for one if it was.

if you have any males in the house, have the flush button for the loo set directly behind the lid of the loo so they are forced to put down both seat and lid to flush! that'll teach them

We have this in our downstairs loo - the unwanted side effect is that if you lean back when on the loo (or turn to get loo roll) you flush the loo by accident... With hindsight I'd have had a flush button to the side!

A downside with my DP would be he wouldn't flush ....

I like the idea of the omnitub - it would be a good solution for my tiny bathroom - It would give us much more room around the loo than a normal bath which would be a big relief as I can't stand being hemmed in when such a facility is needed.

but I'd worry that when we came to sell, would potential buyers think that it wasn't a "real" bath and be put off?

Yeah my plumber couldn't imagine it either, thought we were mental! But I'm so pleased with it. Before we only had room for a little bath that took up half the room so you had to squeeze along it to get to the toilet, and the sink was cramped at the end near the door. Really uncomfortable. But now we've loads of space! Which is bizarre as the bath still takes half the room.

I'd advise not to be afraid of changing the layout. Took us about 5 plumbers before we found one that didn't want to just plumb new stuff into the same places. But eventually we found one that was up for it. Plumbers don't seem to be that imaginative!!

I like the omnitub too. But I have memories of Kevin raising his eyebrows when one featured on grand designs so would have similar concerns..

I kinda think that if someone wants to buy your house they'll buy it for location and the actual physical things you can't change, like space/garden/school catchment. You'd be a bit daft to not buy a house because you didn't like the bathtub.

make sure your floor tiles, including in the shower, are textured. We didn't have this in our last rental and I knocked myself out when I slipped getting out of the shower. Was in agony with my hip and thought I'd broken it. Luckily it was just bruising but it took over a month for the bruises to go.

All I kept thinking was 'thank god it wasn't one of the kids'.

Unless your house is in a rubbish location with no space, no garden and a bad school catcent. In which case all the generic neutral bathrooms in the world won't help :-D

Any way not to everyone's taste for sure x I love it though. X

I will definitely consider one for our en suite. we have other normal baths in the house anyway so its shouldn't put anyone off but it would save me trying to cram in a normal bath and separate shower cubicle.

I was put off buying a house (actually thinking about it - twice!) because they had no bath. One was ideal but they had recently had their main bathroom turned into a wet room...price reflected they thought that was a selling point - and I didn't...knowing I was going to have to 'refurbish' a bathroom knocked £5-10k off the price I was willing to pay.

We have a separate shower but I'd rather have a shower over the bath than no bath... we rarely have baths now DCs are older but there is nothing like a good soak for aching muscles after a long walk or lots of gardening - or when I was in early stages of labour with DD2. (Before DCs a weekly hour long bath was my chill out time - with DCs one of them usually wanted to help me wash my hair (ouch) or get in with me - unless I waited until after bedtime then I was likely to fall asleep in there and wake up freezing...)

They are also useful as huge sinks - for washing out things like hamster cages ....or the carpet washer or anything bulky ...there is more often than not something draining/drying in our bath as it being completely empty...

yes in terms of lighting you should apparently have one each side of the mirror with the bulbs just above your eyeline.

I have this in one my bathrooms, and it is excellent. The basin is set at the mid-point of a 2m back wall, the upper half of that wall is covered by a single large mirror that makes the bathroom look twice the size it is, and there are two wall lamps set in that mirror as described. They are big enough so that you can put in bulbs that light the whole bathroom atmospherically, and don't have to use the ceiling lights which give the ambience of an industrial kitchen. I think I'm going to get rid of the ceiling lights when I re-do that bathroom, and get rid of the one shortcoming of the wall lights, which is that they are controlled by individual push-buttons. They should be turned on by the main light switch.

A mistake I made in my other bathroom was to install a wall light that was turned on by a movement sensor, so that I didn't have to turn on the main light and extractor fan when they weren't needed. The sensor is capricious, turning on the light several times a day when there is nothing nearby. As it's the en-suite, it means the door has to be closed at night so the light doesn't disturb sleep. Even then, some light leaks though gaps in the door.

The movement sensor works through walls, so is capable of detecting "movement" in the boxed in soil pipe that runs through that bathroom from the flats above, so the light kindly comes on to alert me whenever my upstairs neighbours flush their toilet, as obviously that's something I'd want to know when lying in bed at night, or trying to have a romantic evening.

I'm wondering about 'catering'
Just tea and coffee or should ii also provide biscuits for my builders?

My biggest regret is not putting underfloor heating in our bathroom. We have some in the hall now and it's great in the mornings.

Electric tooth brushes leaving scuzzy marks is indeed a nightmare!
I now use these to solve the problem.

Now, I made these myself but surely my tiny brain cannot be the only one to have thought of this?

I had to re-tile a bathroom at an expense of thousands of pound because grout let water through behind the tiles. Eight years later and it's in danger of happening again. (Am going to attempt to re-grout, but one or two of the tiles are already feeling a little loose from water getting in behind.)

Most grout is not waterproof, even when it says it is suitable for showers. (The grout that is now failing is waterproof, but has cracked, either due to error in installation, or because the wall has moved.)

When I next redo a bathroom, I will not use tiles at all. Tiles look nice, but are obsolete technology. My wall covering will be acrylic panels, it only takes two giant sheets to completely cover the two walls of a corner shower. The only gaps that need sealing are where the wall panels join in the corner, and the panels to the shower tray. There is nowhere else for water to go through, I will never again have to replace a bathroom because grout has let water get behind the tiles, because there will be no grout. (If you don't like acrylic you can get sheets of glass the same size, but more expensive.)

When I retiled, I chose tiles that looked like beige/honey coloured marble. I specified beige grout. The grout looked fine when dry, when wet it turned dark and it looked like a black grid on the wall. It took two days to dry out, but I shower twice a day, so there would be a permanent black grid in the shower area if I'd kept it. We had to remove the grout and replace it with a waterproof one that didn't change colour. In the process of ripping it out, tiles were damaged. Remnants of the original grout run along the edge of tiles in some places, making the grout lines look shit/dirty.

The wet grout changing colour meant the grout was more prominent than the tiles, so instead of light coloured marble-effect tiles with invisible light grout lines, what you perceived was a prominent black grid with invisible tiles in the gaps between them.

When planning my next bathroom rebuild I went to a shop and stood in various showers, and realised that in a symmetrical shower (same length and width) if feels 50% bigger if you face a shower-head in the corner as opposed to one in the centre of the wall.

I think this is because the diagonal of a 1 meter square shower is 1.44 meters, so from the centre to the corner is 72cm, whereas from the center to the middle of a wall is only 50cm.

What matters is space to the wall in front of and behind you, and either side of your shoulders, not that half way in-between those two directions. For all practical purposes, a square shower becomes 44% bigger if you put the shower head in the corner instead of the middle of one of the walls.

Having learned that, I will not have a rectangular shower, because the extra space in one dimension is essentially wasted. OK, if it is 2m by 1m with showerhead in the middle of the narrow wall, you will have lots of forward-back space. But your shoulders will be closer to the sidewalls than in a 1m by 1m shower facing the corner. In that respect the bigger shower will feel more cramped. (You don't need more forward back space than you can get from a large symmetrical shower.)

Obviously a 2m by 1m shower with the shower head in the corner would be not be inferior in any respect to a 1m square one. But if the shower is not shooting down the lengh of it, then what is the purpose of the extra square meter? Possible so you can have a walk-in shower, rather than a door, I suppose.

I use a simple soap dish for electric tooth brush heads.

I'm redoing the bathroom in a couple of years, and really want this type of bench where you can sit, scrub heels, do your hair masks etc. Does anybody have one and is it as good as I imagine?

www.houzz.com/photos/153244/In-law-suite-addition-traditional-bathroom-other-metro

Another one saying stay away from the waterfall taps.

We had our bathroom done 6months ago. Visitors ohh & ahh at it and all I can see is the lime scale on the bastarding waterfall taps that one of us will have spent ages scrubbing 24 hours before.

Worst is DP picked them and feels so guilty I have to wait till he's out of the house before I express my feelings to the taps…you know what I mean.

We have lots of stuff we need to do before we start on the want to do…but just thinking now they annoy us each time we see them they have to go on the need pile for sanity.

Lighting: we have 2 fairly soft lights either side of the mirror, plus brighter halogens. They are switched separately from outside the door. So you can adjust the ambience. Considered a dimmer but then it wouldn't have been possible to link the extractor to the lights (I think?)

I bought from Victoria Plumb and to be honest they were great and well priced. The delivery guys also took the steel bath upstairs - something that B&Q won't do. Best thing I bought was the steel bath, it's brilliant and cleans up so much better than the plastic and doesn't flex when taking a shower.
Major mistake was going for a large format porcelain tiles - they were a an absolute bastard to cut out - wouldn't do that again - but then we installed ourselves, so had the pain of cutting rather than a tiler or plumber doing it.

Love the omnitub with the green tiles - looks amazing!