How to choose tiles for bathroom
The bathroom should be a place in which you can feel at peace and relax. In a lot of homes, it seems that the original designers squeezed the bathroom into the smallest possible space – as if they considered it a necessary evil. You may be lucky enough to be designing a new home, an extension to include a bathroom or upgrading a property which has never had the proper facilities. Any of these allow you to greatly influence the size and layout of the bathroom in your home. Even if you are remodelling an existing bathroom and are restricted to the physical size of the room, you may be able to work wonders.
Basic Bath Considerations
If you’ve ever wondered why many bathrooms are back-to-back or why professionals tell you to avoid moving fixtures, it’s because of all the plumbing and mechanical systems you can’t see.
“Back-of-the-wall” systems include various pipes to bring fresh water into the room, pipes to bring hot water from your hot-water heater, pipes to carry away wastewater, more pipes to carry away waste, vent stacks to keep pressure equalized and to prevent sewer gasses from entering the house, and on and on.
Even if your bath is on the third floor of your house, its systems have to route up to the roof and down to the systems buried in your lawn on the ground level. Bottom line: The fixtures are just the end point of an entire system.
If you really want to know about all this in detail, the information is available. If not, simply respect that the system is complex, and be aware that your installers not only need to solve whatever problems they encounter in your individual house, but they also need to solve it within the confines of rigorous building codes designed to safeguard your family’s health and your home’s safe function. Your understanding can help you get the best job possible from your installers.
If you’re remodelling an existing bath, you’ll have to decide whether you want to incur the expense of moving basic fixtures and changing the basic layout. If the existing bath layout really bothers you or is unworkable, your top priority may be to relocate fixtures.
Sample Bath remodelling
2. Batroom with separate Toilet room.
3. Bathroom with separate Shower room and Toilet room
What’s important is that you understand that this is much more complex than, say, moving a king-size bed from one wall of your bedroom to another!
Virtually every bathroom uses one of the following three basic layouts:
• One-wall layout. One-wall baths have the toilet, sink, and combination shower/tub plumbing aligned along one wall, making for a relatively long, narrow bathroom. One-wall layouts are often used where the simplest solution is to cut off the “end” of a long room and dedicate it to bath fixtures. This layout is also frequently used for powder room or half bath layouts. You may find extra fixtures, such as a bidet, a separate tub, and a separate shower in a one-wall bath, but it’s not common.
• Two-wall layout. Two-wall baths usually have the toilet and sink on one wall and the shower/tub combo (or separate shower and tub) on the other. You might also find the toilet and bidet on one wall and the shower/tub and the sink on the other, depending on the length of each wall. A two-wall layout offers a desirable sense of enclosure, but care must be taken to ensure that fixtures are placed far enough from each other and from the door for safety and comfortable use.
• Three-wall layout. A three-wall layout, with the toilet on one wall, sink on another, and combination shower/tub on the third, is a space-conserving solution that can put every fixture within a step of the others. It’s also the layout you’re likely to see in a master bath with numerous extra fixtures such as a bidet, more than one sink, and a separate tub and shower. If you are remodeling an old bath and want to install a number of new upgrades, a room that’s already plumbed in the three-wall layout may be the easiest to work with.
Planning your bathroom layout:
Designing a new bathroom layout – remember there are no absolute rules, after all it is your bathroom.
First of all, list items you want included in your bathroom suite, these are the most likely ones you will want to include.
- Bath and/or shower
- Hand basin
- WC.
- Bidet
Then decide on other fixings you may want:
- Electric shaver point
- Mirror (with over light ?)
- Extractor fan
- Bathroom cabinet
- Medicine chest
- Laundry basket
- A chair or stool
- Shelves
Using Color, Texture and Space
Everything in your bathroom includes design elements that can be used to achieve balance, rhythm, and emphasis. These elements occur naturally together, so it may take a bit of practice to see them. Once you do, you’ll be able to make the often small corrections that give your bath maximum eye appeal.
Color
Color is the most compelling element. Whole books have been written on how to use color, but a few basic techniques are worth noting here.
Choosing tiles for floors and walls that co-ordinate but don’t match will give you a more relaxed look. For best effect, buy them together from the same supplier so you can match the tones.
Light colors reflect light and make a space or an object look larger and airier; dark colors absorb light and make them look smaller and denser.
Contrasting colors stop the eye, breaking up space and making it look smaller. The same or similar colors across surfaces allow the eye to keep moving and unify a space, making the whole area look larger.
Warm colors, such as red, orange, or yellow, reflect light and advance toward the viewer, making the item or wall seem closer and larger. The same goes for pastel versions of these tones — pink, coral, peach, and cream — but the effect is modified by how much white is in the mix. Pale pink won’t come at you the way hot pink will, but it still imparts a sense of warmth.
Cool colors like blue, green, and violet absorb light and recede from the viewer, making the item or wall seem farther away and smaller.
To maximize a sense of spaciousness and repose in the bath, you might opt for a scheme of light colors accented by cool colors in pastel strengths to keep the contrasts low. However, many people prefer pastel tones of warmer colors — blush tones, for example — for their complexion-enhancing qualities. And some prefer to go with, rather than against, a bath’s small dimensions by using dark, rich colors for maximum coziness. The choice is yours!
When you want to draw attention to special features or just create a sense of visual excitement in a room, call on bright, advancing colors to do the job.
If your bathroom includes a window, keep in mind the room’s exposure to the sun. Light from the north and the east is cool, with light rays coming from the blue end of the spectrum. South and west light is warm because the sun’s rays come from the red end.
Color Scheming
To understand color relationships, imagine a color wheel with colors appearing in this order: red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, red-violet, and back to red. This is the order in which colors appear in a rainbow. Tints of colors are made by adding white (e.g., red-orange plus white gives us coral). Shades of colors are made by adding black (e.g., blue-green plus black creates teal). This information comes in handy when you’re trying to create a scheme of colors that look well together.
A pure white bath looks clean, airy, and spacious because white or very pale colors reflect light, visually expanding the room. It’s especially useful for small-space baths
Line and Shape
Line and shape occur in the bath as design elements that affect how the room appears. For example, the vertical lines of wall cabinets, windows, the shower stall, and doors can make a room look taller; horizontal lines in the edges of the vanity and tub can make it look broader. Floor tiles contribute to line as well: Tiles laid diagonally make the floor appear larger than those laid parallel to the walls.
Space and Form
Space and form are the architect’s tools for creating balance in the largest sense of the word. Space, or voids, have a real presence; they are not just the absence of form and are especially important when creating asymmetrical balance. In the bath, you’ll immediately sense when space and form are out of whack (e.g., when all fixtures are on one wall with no balancing cabinetry or area of interest on the opposite wall).
Form includes mass as well as shape that you can modify with visual techniques. For instance, a small bath with a conventional shower/tub combo looks even more cramped with a busily patterned, dark-colored shower curtain, no matter how pretty, taking up most of one wall. Replace it with a clear liner or a glass door, and the mass recedes to the far shower wall. By the same token, white cabinets look less massive than cabinets of the same dimension in natural oak.
Most people feel more comfortable when the largest eye-level masses in a room are not blocking their line of sight into the room. A shower stall or tub set behind the door or on the opposite wall will make a bath look larger than that same form set close to the entryway. A sink, even one in a vanity, is below eye level, so it may work nicely along the right side of a room near the door. Toilets are an exception, although their profile is low. If you’d like the toilet out of sight, screen or enclose it with a full- or half-height partition out of the line of sight of the entryway. It’s the mass of the partition, not the toilet, that then determines its placement in the room.
Suppose your budget won’t allow moving fixtures to the most visually appropriate walls. Use the visual techniques of color and line to make a mass appear less or more prominent and to achieve balance. As long as you make sure they reflect something attractive, you can use mirrors abundantly in the bath to fool the eye, bring in more light, create a sense of depth, draw attention to a focal point on the opposite wall, and more. Even a modest effort will yield big results!
Choosing bathroom fixtures / decorations
The colour and style of a bathroom suite are personal matters but:
- Think twice before selecting exotic colours or exaggerated shapes; you could tire of them in a very short time.
- Often colours come and go in fashion (and availability), and the exact same colour may not be available from different manufacturers.
By choosing standard white as the suite colour:
- you can almost guarantee that you will be able to find a suitable replacement for any item needing replacement in future.
- you will be able to select different items from different manufacturers – remember, while complete suites are often promoted, you can purchase each item separate if you require.
Ceramic tiles and bathroom firxtures manufactors in Bulgaria:
Get A Proper Job Done
The thing to remember about a bathroom is that you really can’t do it yourself. Plumbing, tiling and electrics all require professional expertise, and that costs money. A bathroom comes close to a kitchen in terms of expense and inconvenience.
Get A Good Builder
Consult a builder early on in the project, so you can gauge how realistic your plans are. Bespoke bathrooms require the services of a qualified builder. A reputable builder will have an electrician to install lighting, a hot water boiler, and any heating, a plumber to install water and drainage pipes and finally a skilled builder to do the tiling of your bathroom.
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