Tips for Creating An Easy To Clean Bathroom
So you’re renovating your bathroom?
Here’s your big chance to get it right, create your very own urban spa and most importantly free yourself from the shackles of that less-than–glamorous bathroom gunge. Here are my top tips for creating a bathroom that is high on style and low on cleaning.
1. Keep Grout To A Minimum
Grout would have to be the bain of every hot-blooded housewife’s life so the aim is to keep it to a minimum. There are a few ways to go about this.
Minimal tiling.
Tile the shower, the floor and add a skirting tile to the walls. It’s the most practical option but definitely not a recipe for the bathroom that dreams are made of.
A much more luxurious look is to go for seraphic glass instead of tiles. It is toughened and can be coloured in any Dulux colour. The big catch is that at more than $300 a square meter, it is out of the reach for many. My personal favorite is large format tiles, the bigger the tile, the less grout. 600 X 300mm wall tiles laid horizontally or 600 X 600 tiles are the format of choice.
2. Avoid Unglazed (matt) Porcelain Tiles.
They produce an effect called optical hazing caused by the light reflecting off the surface particles. It creates a hazy, smudgy finish and looks like they are not clean, even when they are. Big fail!
3. Neutral Coloured Floor Grout.
Dark grout gathers dust and looks cloudy, light grout gets dirty. Neutral grout is just right.
Wall-hung vanity.
This not only looks good but makes cleaning the floor much quicker and easier with no corners to harbour dirt and no obstacles to navigate. It also makes the room look bigger, because the floor is visible all the way to where it meets the wall.
A Walk In Shower
The walk in shower is the ultimate in style. With a single blade of glass and no door, it is definitely a low clean option.
6. Mixer taps
When it comes to cleaning taps it is a numbers game. The beauty of mixer taps is that they have only one component to clean around while the traditional taps have 3, the hot, the cold and the spout.
7.Ventilation
A bathroom is a good breeding ground for mould. There is nothing more distressing than the appearance of black specks of mould marching up your freshly painted walls and ceilings.
Eliminate the cultivation of mould in your bathroom by ensuring there is sufficient ventilation by installing an exhaust fan or an IXLtastic. Paint the walls and ceilings with either mould resistant bathroom paint or low sheen oil based paint.
A Close Coupled or In Wall Cistern
In a close-coupled configuration the pan and cistern are connected so that there are no exposed pipes. An in-wall cistern is installed in the wall cavity. Both create a more streamlined arrangement that is much easier to clean.
It doesn’t matter how much you hate cleaning, the bathroom is one area that cant be left for the weekly clean, it needs to be done daily. Adopting some of these measures when renovating will significantly reduce the daily swish around the bathroom.
Image Credits: Bernadette Janson
