We notice the tile first; we don’t notice the leak until much later. That’s the trouble with bathrooms, all the things we see get all our focus, while the components that really help keep the space together hide in plain sight until they break down.
Good bathroom design involves far more than simply selecting fixtures and finishes. It also requires an understanding of the work taking place behind the walls and below the floors, long before we ever pick out a tile colour.
When the Floor Tells Us Something
We know that a few inches of movement in our floor will occur as the years pass; however, a noticeable give at a particular location of your floor could be indicative of moisture entering through the subfloor. When you push against the floor at a particular location and experience some type of “give” or “spongy” feeling there, you need to take a closer look before it begins to spread.
A Bad Odour that Just Won’t Go Away
It is common for every bathroom to develop a slight mouldy or musty odour after a very hot shower. However, most odours fade rapidly. Any bad odour that lingers for many hours or continually comes back despite frequent cleaning is typically a result of water being trapped somewhere it shouldn’t be, within a wall cavity or under the flooring, where there is limited ventilation.
Your Grout Lines Have Been Sending Messages Quietly
Darkened or cracked grout near the bottom of your tub or along your shower floor is almost never purely an aesthetic issue. Grout is supposed to move slightly with your home, but repeated cracking in the same location(s) indicates that something beneath the surface is either moving or staying wet longer than it should. While caulking may temporarily solve the problem, repeated problems indicate that you have larger issues to resolve.
More Than Water Pressure, What It Says About Your Pipes
A sudden loss of water pressure or water temperature fluctuations can seem like a minor nuisance. They’re typically indicative of issues growing inside your pipes themselves. This same pressure fluctuation is what plumbers report seeing immediately before a small leak turning into a larger plumbing repair job. Even if nothing appears to be broken at the moment, it might be worth reporting.
Why It Makes Sense to Inspect Before You Install New Flooring and Finishes
Before installing any new finishes in any area of your bathroom that you plan to renovate (even if it’s just a small renovation), consider opening up a portion of your wall or floor near areas that have given you cause to believe they’ve been experiencing some of these early warning signs. The cost associated with doing so will likely be minimal, but it will save you from creating a beautiful room that will ultimately fail due to structural issues that were only identified once they had developed further.
Bathrooms require patience. Those that perform well year-in and year-out are generally those where owners recognised their silent indicators of potential failure long before they became a problem.
