Very dull shower/tiling question but v grateful for your opinion...

[kitsmummy]

Hi, new bathroom is being fitted right now and I've come up with a bit of an issue over the shower.

We are having a shower enclosure with large white porcelain tiles from Mandarin Stone. We then have this fixed shower head. Due to my husband's height, the shower head needs to be level with the top of the enclosure, so therefore the actual arm will be fixed to the wall a few inches above the top of the enclosure.

Our ceiling is quite high and we are only tiling in the enclosure itself, eg we're not tiling the whole wall or anything like that. So I'm planning that the tiles will finish in line with the top of the enclosure and the arm itself will be fixed to the plaster a few inches above the top of the tiling.

Does this sound ok to you, or do you think the tiles should go higher than the top of the shower? I thought it sounded fine how I planned to have it, but my plumbers have not done this before, so now I'm worrying that it may look odd if it's not the usual way to do it?

I would tile all the way up to the ceiling in the shower if I were you as I think it will look bit odd if just to top of enclosure, we only tiled upto ceiling in enclosure and then halfway all the way around rest of bathroom.

I should have said, the ceiling is about 2ft higher than the top of the shower, does that make any difference? thanks

Better tile all the way upto the ceiling.

That sounds fine to me, it's what I would do.

I think what you're planning sounds good. Would look odd to have tiles going another 2 feet up to the ceiling!

Thank you all, 1 with me, 2 against! The tiling is being started next week, so I have a few days.

I'm really struggling to find pics of showers the way I imagined ours being done...which leads me to think that perhaps there's a reason for that .

In fact I have now managed to find one photo which suggests that perhaps my idea wasn't the best one I've ever had i will not stop crying if my bathroom turns out like this

Your plan sounds good to me, OP.

When we did our shower, our builders told us not to tile up to the ceiling but to leave about 20-30 cms which we did and it look great.

Oh Wilting I missed your post. I too thought it would look odd having tiles above the enclosure but I'm struggling to find good pics of what I'm imagining. The other option is to have the tile finishing around 20-30cm above the top of the enclosure? Sounds odd in my head but seems fairly common online?

Oh I keep x-posting with everyone. V grateful for your opinions, off to bed in a mo but will check back in the morning when hopefully it will be clear cut and glaringly obvious which option I need to go for

up to the ceiling in this case.
the water spray would make the plaster/paint look grubby quickly.

The ceiling in our bathroom is about 13 ft so we have tiles that stop at the top of the shower enclosure. It looks fine and the walls don't get grubby. (The detailed coving moulding at the ceiling attracts dust above the shower where the steam rises, but we get up a ladder and clean that).

But I think that if you are having the shower arm fitted at higher than the door level you should certainly have the tiles up to this point or it will look as though you have run out of tiles. The shower head is part of the shower so the tiles will pull it all together.

Op, we have just gone through this same dilemma. There was many wasted hours and late nights on it. I ended up just not being happy having the shower arm attached to the plaster wall. The tiles would have come a couple of cm under the shower head. Cue lots of hours of dh and I on google images. Our problem was that our horrendously expensive mosaic only came in boxes and we only needed a few cm. we approached the tile company to see on the off chance they had a sheet lying about, and they had had a return that they were willing to sell to us by the sheet. Also, our screen height was not fixed, so we tiled a little higher and made the shower screen taller to match the tiles (10 foot walls so not tiled to the roof, about 30cm down). The other issue was that we were having a cabinet made over the toilet and the height of that was also determined by the height of the tiles and the enclosure. I am really happy with what I choose, so my recommendation would be to tile to the roof, provided you have enough tiles.

Or at least tile above the shower arm... Not sure i made that clear. Agree with the above poster that it looked like we didn't have enough times and spiked the flow. I am seriously in love with my new shower....

Spoiled the flow, even

thanks all, I think the general concensus seems to be that the tiling needs to go above the top of the enclosure, so I think we'll go with tiling a bit above it so that the arm fixes to tiles. Luckily, the tiles will be a similar colour to the painted wall, so I guess it won't show that much.

thanks!