How do you design and furnish a bathroom that will be really easy to clean? Check out these useful tips
Beautiful, spectacular, comfortable... but are they also easy to clean? When designing a bathroom (or choosing new fixtures and fittings for it), ease of cleaning them should also be taken into account. So, how best to do this? Well, let's check out some tips below.
1. Wall tiles: no small ones
Walls clad with small tiles - like mosaics - can be very beautiful. But small tiles also means lots of joints and grouting to keep clean and mold-free. If you must have small tiles, relegate them to just small, defined areas to save yourself from this tedious task.
This "rule" applies to both the walls and floors, of course!
2. The best materials for taps
When it comes to taps and other similar fittings, it's clear that metals remain a popular choice (stainless steel, bronze, copper, etc). But metals get dull quickly and marred with limescale deposits.
So what options are there? Well, taps with a chrome finish are suitable for a modern decor; metal with a satin black finish is also an option you can go for (perhaps suitable for a more rustically-styled bathroom).
3. Countertops
Natural stone (and marble in particular) continues to be a popular material for countertops. But natural stone is porous, making it vulnerable to "soaking up" dirt and grime and requiring considerable effort to keep clean (and sometimes even requiring professional help).
Your best bet, is to go for a non-porous material: quartz, laminates (which can imitate any material!) and even certain resins will make your bathroom cleaning rountine easier.
4. Must your sink cabinet sit flush to the floor?
This tip might not be a popular opinion, considering current design trends: it’s hard to resist the attractive look of "floating fixtures" and minimalist decor (with just a shelf above a sink's countertop, for example). These designs are attractive, visually uncluttered, and make cleaning the floor easy.
However, if there’s another shelf or a cabinet under a sink, these "extrea" surfaces can collect a lot of dirt. To make cleaning easier, some interior designers suggest avoiding having any open spaces between the cabinet base and the floor, (or between the cabinet and the bathroom wall). This way, dust, hair, and dirt won’t get trapped in hard-to-reach places.
If you don’t like the idea of filling your bathroom with a bulky furnishing units that sit flush to the floor, a good compromise is to choose cabinets that have enough clearance around them to make cleaning easy.
5. Walk-in showers
Most of use choose glass for the vertical surfaces of our shower cubicles rather than curtains (which are a nightmare to keep clean). And if you want to minimize the number of nooks and crannies to clean, then the next thing to consider is installing a walk-in shower, ie. one that does not have raised floor and/or a shower step.
6. Minimalism
For some of us, it's hard to resist the urge to keep all our bathroom "goodies" readily to hand. But the more objects there are laying around, the more there is to move, dust and clean. Get into the habit of keeping these items in your bathroom cabinets and your bathroom cleaning chores will go much quicker!
