The following points might help you decide what you want/don’t want in your bathroom.
1. Reliability vs Looks
- Panels are easier to clean and look great, but tiles are much stronger
- Black/Matt options look nice, but you have to clean them with soft sponge/soft chemicals.
- Storage units in a bathroom and under sink are extremely popular (and very useful), but almost none of them are waterproof. Pedestal sinks don’t look the best, but they’re cheap and 100% waterproof
- Vinyl click flooring is warmer to the feet and looks better sometimes that tiles, but strong bleach solutions can discolour it
- An LED mirror creates an amazing effect in a room, but something with electronics inside will always be less reliable than a simple mirror
- Downlights look great, but it’s easier to replace a single bulb, rather than 4-5
The most reliable design in our opinion
If you want to get the best quality bathroom, we consider you should consider the following:
- Use tiles, which are stronger and longer lasting than panels. Use Epoxy Grout if the budget allows it.
- Don’t use any MDF products. This means a ceramic sink without storage, toilet with a ceramic cistern
- Keep a single light. Many bathroom downlights are not user-replaceable.
- Use a very good extractor fan.
- If the budget allows it, use taps/showers + cistern (if it’s a concealed cistern) from companies like Grohe or Hansgrohe.
- Don’t use concealed showers or wall mounted taps if possible.
- Don’t use waterfall taps since they’re overspraying everywhere.
- Use a simple mirror. The LED mirrors are overly complex and fail often.
- Use a walk in shower instead of a shower enclosure (since there are almost no movable parts with that).
- Try to avoid a bathtub with a glass screen and/or MDF panel. If you can live with it, a shower curtain will keep the water better inside. If you really want a glass, consider a P shaped bathtub instead.
- If you have a bathtub with a standard bath screen, try to use a tiled version of the panel (which is still removable)
- Avoid soft close toilet seats. They will inevitably fail, sometimes in a matter of months, even if you buy a premium one. Moulded wood, non-soft close toilet seats last the longest.
2. Change the layout only if you really have to
Bathroom refurbishments are already expensive for most of us, so keeping the layout more or less the same will keep the costs down.
3. Dare to choose something different
Many customers just choose white everywhere, afraid to commit to a different colour. Even if it’s something slightly different, like painting the walls jasmine white instead of pure white, it will make things more personalised.
Even if you go with everything white, simply adding 2-3 mosaic tiles in the room would completely change the look.
4. Reduce costs if you have to, but don’t do things cheaply.
An average bathroom takes us around 5 working days to complete, with 2-3 hardworking tradesmen. Only during the last day we usually fit the bathroom suite, the rest of the time is spent doing hidden work: plasterboard, subflooring, plumbing, electrics and so on. If you have a very low budget, the contractor has no choice but to do things ‘cheaply’ and omit certain steps.
For this reason, we simply refuse projects with an unrealistic low budget. We offer a long warranty on our services, and it’s simply impossible to do a good job unless our prices can cover at least all the costs.
This doesn’t mean that value-for-money is not important, it’s extremely important. For this reason we still try to be the best quote (and we offer a price matching promise), as long as the other quote offers the same warranty level as us (5 years).
5. Take a look at our past projects
You can find below a collection of photos of stuff we’ve done over the years. Looking at various past projects you’ll have a better understanding on what you like (and what you don’t like)
6. Take a look at our bathroom blog posts
You can find below some articles we posted a while ago. They’re not very recent since it’s hard to find time for this, but they might be useful in your design process.
7. Involve your friends/family in the process
We’ve done many-many bathrooms over the years. The happiest customers were those customers that received positive feedback from friends/family.
If you can involve them in selecting some colours or ideas on what you should get, this would definitely help and make the experience much more pleasant. Create a memory out of the design process and things will be much easier.