blog posts for November 2018

The main bathroom is often one of the most underrated parts of a house. Just because it is one of the smallest rooms, people who are decorating or renovating often think it needs less thought put into aspects like colour and lighting than the living room, kitchen, or bedrooms. In actual fact, how comfortable and luxurious your bathroom is can make quite a difference to how it feels to live in or visit your home, and so it is worth putting some time into planning out the details. This doesn’t just mean the main fixtures like the shower or bath, but also aesthetic elements like lighting.

Why is Lighting Important in a Bathroom?

You may think that as long as you aren’t trying to shower or use the toilet in the dark, then the lighting in your bathroom is fine. Actually, with good lighting, your bathroom can become a more relaxing place in the evening, a more energising place in the morning, and a more convenient place to do things like put on makeup, style your hair or shave. This generally means that you need to think about separate lighting elements – your above mirror lighting, lighting for the room in general, and possibly also lighting for the shower or bath.

LED is Always Best

When it comes to bathroom lighting, always go for LED for new or refurbished fittings. LED lasts longer, is more energy efficient, and gives you more choice when it comes to light tones or colours. Plain LED lights allow you to choose between blue, yellow or white tones for your light, and in the bathroom, a yellow tone that emulates sunlight is preferable. This is because it is less harsh and gives you a better impression of how you actually look in daylight when you are getting ready in front of the mirror. White or blue tones can be effective as a style choice for the whole room, but if you are using spotlights above the mirror, a warmer tone is better there.

Colour Changing Lights

It is currently quite fashionable in interior design to use colour changing lights in showers, and there is a good reason for this. It has been shown by psychologists that different colours from the light spectrum have different effects on the brain. This means that being able to change the lighting in your shower is not just a cool gimmick but can actually be used to help relax you or wake you up. Naturally, this makes taking a shower is a better experience, and also looks great, so consider getting a colour changing LED light system for your shower. These are less expensive than they were just a few years ago and can make a big difference to how luxurious and pleasant using your home shower is!

As you can see, bathroom lighting is important when you are trying to make your bathroom as convenient as possible, just as other things like heated towel rails can make your bathroom one of the nicest parts of your home, despite it being small!

The question of how often you need to wash towels, bath mats and rugs is a common one. If you stay in a hotel, you would expect the towels to be freshly laundered, but at home, it is very easy to overlook the fact you haven’t washed a towel for a week or two, particularly if it is a colour that doesn’t show the dirt. So how often should you be throwing these items into the laundry basket?

Mould and Bacteria

Hygiene is a big issue in a bathroom. Water, moist air and a lack of ventilation can all cause mould, mildew and harmful bacteria to build up. Towels are absorbent, so they hold on to moisture. Damp towels soon become a breeding ground for bacteria and other germs. Hanging a damp towel on a radiator or heated towel rail will help it to dry out faster, but if the heating isn’t on during the day, damp towels stay damp for extended periods of time.

Every time you use a towel to dry off your body when you step out the shower or bath, dead skin cells collect in the fibres of the towel. Over time, that’s a lot of exfoliated skin!

Hand towels are used multiple times a day: for drying hands and wiping faces. If there are four people living in your home, that’s an awful lot of use for one towel every single day.

Washing Bath Towels

Whether you have a shower once a day or every three days, it really doesn’t matter, but what does matter is that you wash your towel every 3-5 times you use it. So if you have a shower every other day, your towel needs washing about once a week. Ideally a towel should be left to dry out completely between each use, preferably on a heated towel rail or over a radiator. But, if your towel never has the opportunity to dry out thoroughly, it needs washing more frequently.

Washing Hand Towels

Hand towels get a lot more use, so these need washing regularly. The more people sharing the bathroom, the more often you need to wash your hand towels. Experts advise that a hand towel should be laundered every two or three days. For this reason, it is sensible to have a stack of clean towels on the go, so you can throw the dirty one on the laundry basket and replace it with a fresh one.

Washing Bath Mats

Bathmats don’t have the luxury of being allowed to dry off. They usually sit in a waterproof floor, so every time someone climbs out of the bath and stands on the mat, dripping, as they towel dry their body, that’s a lot of water collecting right there.

Damp bath mats soon become a magnet for bacteria and mould, so it is sensible to wash a fabric bath mat once a week. Just throw it in with your towels. Rubber backed bath mats need to be treated with greater care, as frequent washing will destroy the rubber coating. If this is the case, wash it every 3-4 weeks and have a spare handy, in case your mat starts to look grubby.

Towels and fabric bath mats need to be washed on a warm 60 degree setting, as this is the only temperature guaranteed to eradicate germs. They can then be thrown in the tumble drier or hung on a washing line for a dose of outside freshness (note: rubber backed bath mats should be left to air dry; do not put them in a tumble drier!).

Once your towels start to look a bit threadbare or they have lost their colour, replace them with some fresh new ones.