If you’re thinking of having your bathroom renovated, there are three not-so-obvious dangers to keep in mind if you want a great job. Deal with these correctly and you’ll have years of durable, leak-free, mould-free performance. Get them wrong and your new bathroom won’t last nearly as long as it could.
Water leaks
People generally shower or bathe more often than they used to decades ago, and this is why “the way we’ve always done it” doesn’t work so well anymore when it comes to finishing walls and floors in a bathroom. Huge advancements have been made in the area, so there’s no need to settle for an approach that was leading edge in 1955.
My favourite system of bathroom waterproofing comes from a company called Schluter. Their KERDI-BOARD product is a structural foam board that comes in different thicknesses and is used to cover surfaces for tiling. It cuts with a knife yet is strong enough to even make shower benches out of.
KERDI-BOARD is made to work with KERDI cloth to create a shower or tub area that’s completely waterproof even before tiles go on. That’s important. If you rely on tiles and grout to keep water out in any way, you will have leaks and rotting happen in hidden places over time.
Schluter also offers gaskets for sealing around pipes that enter a bathtub or shower area, as well as high-end drain grates, tile accessories and the best electric in-floor heating system I’ve installed and lived with.
Insufficient ventilation
Everyone knows that bathrooms need ventilation fans to exhaust excess moisture outdoors, but what’s less known is how standard bathroom fans are sub-standard in two ways.
First, most bathroom fans move too little air to be optimal, allowing humid air to remain in the bathroom longer than ideal. I don’t find that the standard approach of eight air changes per hour to be enough. Ten or even 12 changes per hour is noticeably better at keeping wall and ceiling surfaces dry.
As an example, if your bathroom measures 10×12 feet with eight-foot ceilings, this works out to 960 cubic feet. Multiplied by 10 gives 9,600 cubic feet per hour of air movement required. Bathroom fan capacity is measured in cubic feet per minute, so this translates to 9,600 divided by 60 minutes per hour = 160 cubic feet per minute of fan capacity. Standard bathroom fans are often only half this powerful. If you like a particular fan but it’s somewhat larger than your calculations show as necessary, opt to go up in capacity, not down.
Also, as you shop, look for the “sone” rating on any fan you’re considering. Sones are a measure of noise output in the world of fans, and 1.0 sone is a very quiet unit indeed. There’s no need to put up with a bathroom fan that sounds like an airliner taking off. Panasonic is my favourite brand. I have two at my house and they work exceptionally well and quietly.
Insufficient mould protection
Even with a powerful and quiet exhaust fan on your side, moisture on painted drywall can sometimes still trigger mould growth on walls and ceilings. This is why it makes sense to employ multiple layers of mould prevention safety by using the right kind of paint.
Paints sold specifically for bathrooms have an anti-mould compound mixed right in, and this can make a world of difference. If the paint you want to use is not available in a mould-resistant version, you can buy a colloidal silver compound to add to the paint to get the same effect. Both the primer and topcoats should have mould-resistant additives.
As with many things in life, success comes down to details that are often overlooked. This is especially true with bathrooms.
