What To Consider When Planning A Wet Room

Over the last 10 years, wet rooms have become increasingly popular. Here at Ream, we’ve certainly noticed more people enquiring about whether a wet room is suitable for their home. From making your showering experience feel much more luxurious to simply speeding up your morning routine, wet rooms offer many benefits. However, as such an important part of your daily life, you’ll need to think carefully before removing your bath and reinventing your space. We’ve put together this comprehensive guide to help you make the right decision.

What’s The Difference Between A Wet Room And A Shower Room

In a shower room or traditional bathroom, some areas, like your shower enclosure, are waterproof and some are not. In a wet room, the whole room is waterproof, which means you no longer require a shower tray. You can have drainage built into the floor, allowing you to install a stylish, seamless walk-in shower. Most people choose to get rid of their bath to accentuate the spacious feel and create a more luxurious showering experience.

The Benefits Of A Wet Room

Stylish Streamlined Looks

Combining a dramatic surface finish with stylish contemporary hardware will leave you with a stylish and luxurious bathroom. The minimal, streamlined aesthetic established by a modern wet room makes a gorgeous design statement.

Maximises Space

Removing your bath, opting for sleek modern furniture and doing away with a cramped and cluttered traditional shower enclosure is a great way to open up your room, creating the visual illusion of more space while also enhancing how you move around and enjoy your bathroom.

Great Accessibility

Whether it’s the lip of a shower tray or the edge of a bath, a sleek wet room eliminates trip hazards and makes it easy to pop in and out of the shower. This can be great for little ones and their worried parents, as well as the elderly and those with mobility challenges. Some of our clients have chosen to install a wet room as a way of future-proofing their home.

Easy To Clean

With no intricate details, ledges or water sensitive areas to worry about, cleaning your wet room is as simple as wiping everything down and rinsing it out.

Adds Value To Your Home

A well-designed wet room could add value to your property. A second bathroom, ensuite, or guest bathroom with a wet room can really appeal to buyers. Wet rooms are becoming increasingly desirable.

The Disadvantages Of A Wet Room

Gets Steamy & Damp

If you often use your bathroom to do your make-up and get ready, you might find trying to do this in a damp and steamy room rather tricky. Walking on a wet floor after you’ve dried off isn’t very pleasant.

Can Be Expensive

Waterproofing and tiling an entire room requires a lot of materials and is very labour intensive, this can make wet rooms more expensive.

Can Decrease The Value Of Your Property

Young families tend to need a home with a bathtub, as showers are not suitable for very small children. And, from time to time, many of us enjoy a long and relaxing soak in the bath. While opting for a wet room as a second bathroom is fine, transforming your master bathroom into a wet room could decrease the value of your home.

Things To Consider…

Keeping Towels Dry

If you’re installing a wet room in a small bathroom, you need to consider the impact that spray from the shower will have on bath towels, toilet rolls and other pieces in the room. Nobody likes a soggy toilet roll! You might want to think about installing a shower screen or building a storage niche to help keep things dry.

Choosing Suitable Tiles & Furniture

When it comes to choosing sanitaryware, there is no need to buy anything specially designed for wet rooms. However, you should bear in mind that wood can warp and rot if it gets wet. Tiles are a different matter altogether. Tiles must be non-porous. Slate or marble tiles will need sealing every few months to prevent water damage and require special care when cleaning. Finally, you should only use non-slip floor tiles specifically designed for bathrooms.

Underfloor Heating

Underfloor heating can help dry the floor and enhance the streamlined look of your space. It’s worth considering if you’re investing in a luxurious wet room.

Ventilation

With so much extra moisture in the air, good ventilation is essential. Excess moisture can be particularly problematic in windowless bathrooms with wet rooms, but even wet rooms with windows can experience issues. An excellent extractor fan is vital to help prevent damp and mould.

Installing A Wet Room

There is no getting away from the fact that installing a wet room is a major project and not something that can be done in a couple of days. The entire room will have to be “tanked”, which involves putting a plastic or rubber waterproof membrane or waterproof liquid compound on all the walls and floors before tiling. The fitter will also have to adjust the floor so that it slopes very slightly in the direction of the drainage point. This can be done in one of the following ways:

• Install a sub-floor that’s made from a type of plywood called WBP Ply that can be tiled over.
• Install a ready-made sloping shower former that can be tiled over.

If you have a wooden sub-floor, the direction of your joists is crucial to where your drain can be positioned. You’ll also need to think about which way the waste water will run to avoid any tricky wedging effects. Finally, to be safe, the bathroom door threshold should ideally be raised 5mm from the floor. This is to stop water flowing out of the bathroom into the rest of the house should the drainage waste become blocked. All of this requires substantial building work. You should expect to be without your bathroom for at least a fortnight while the wet room is installed.

Wet rooms offer lots of fantastic benefits, but understandably, they aren’t for everyone. Installing a wet room does mean totally starting afresh on a room, which is something to consider. For more information about wet rooms or any other bathroom transformations, please give our friendly expert team a call on 01634 799909 or email us at [email protected].