Careful consideration and clever design are critical for a successful wet room. No matter what material you settle on, you need to ensure that your space remains watertight and straightforward to clean. Functionality is equally important as the aesthetics of your new washroom, or you’ll face expensive leaks and mould issues! To get the balance correct between a beautiful bathroom and facilities that are easy to maintain, you’ve got to be purposeful with every feature you install.
Save yourself the wasted time, the expense and the heartache of a poorly constructed washroom. Here are five things to consider when designing a wet room, so you get it right from the beginning.
1. Determine Your Size Of Wet Room
Before you can begin to buy tiles or hygienic wall cladding, you need to know the surface area you’re covering and where you’re planning to build. Thanks to modern expertise with drainage systems, you can install wet rooms on any level in your house. You aren’t confined to the ground floor!
A minimum guide size for your wet room is 800mm x 800mm, but you can use as much space as you’ve got. Just bear in mind that a greater surface area means you’ll need to buy and clean more material, but you will have more room to enjoy.
2. Tailor Drainage To Your Floor Type
Timber floors and solid floors need to be differently approached when you’re planning to install a wet room. Timber flooring requires a base to be fitted underneath the floorboards, alongside waterproofing membranes and a drainage system. Solid flooring needs a gradient formed into the screed, at a minimum depth of 12mm, before you can install a drainage system.
Remember to correlate the size of your drainage system to the size of your wet room. More extensive showers will need a longer grill and a drainage system with a higher capacity.
3. Start Planning Waterproofing Early
You’ve got to prepare your room for the water pressure your shower can accommodate, or it’ll flood. A head of water with a higher flow rate will require more drainage traps. If you’ve got professional assistance, mention the flow rate that you desire for your water while you’re sorting drainage. Your contractor will ensure you have enough traps before you irreversibly install a screed drain.
For an entirely watertight room, you’ll need to seal any gaps in your shower wall cladding panels with a membrane. Extending your sealant across the entire wet room is beneficial. Still, your primary focus should be around the shower and a one-metre stretch on either side of the water flow.
4. Sort Safety Tiling
While it may seem like an obvious statement, the flooring of your wet room is critical. Any tiling you add to the room must be watertight, but there are other elements you’ll need to remember too. Floor tiles must be ultimately even to avoid trips and textured to prevent slips. Beyond functional safety, there are thousands of flooring styles you could choose.
A popular wet room style features the same tiles on the floor as your walls for a coherent space. You’ll avoid the hassle of trying to match the colour of your wall cladding to your flooring tiles.
5. Finish With Air Vents And Fittings
Though your toilet and your shower unit may be the most prominent elements of your washroom, they needn’t be installed until much later on. You must take appropriate steps to combat condensation before adding steamy water supplies, so add vents after you’ve sorted your tiling.
No matter the size and shape of your shower or toilet, adequate ventilation prevents dampness and mould development. Only once your walls are hygienic and waterproof with functioning vents should you begin to browse bathroom suite furniture. And that is the easiest part!
6. Seek Support From Superb Professionals
Although we do not install the wet rooms, we do sell the wall panelling to a lot of plumbers and builders who do make them, many of which do so for the council for disabled bathroom conversions.
You can contact us here at C&A to find out what styles of cladding you would like.
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