A guide
A bathroom ages through three things, and none of them is the tile.
A well-built bathroom is largely maintenance-free, with three exceptions: silicone, grout and the moving parts inside the shower valve. Nearly every room that looks tired after five years has a problem with one of those three rather than with anything structural — which is good news, because that is the inexpensive half to put right. Here is how to keep a new AWS bathroom looking the way it did on hand-over day, and how to tell a cosmetic issue from one worth ringing us about.
01
The first fortnight
Let it cure before you use it
Adhesive, grout and silicone all need time, and cold rooms need more of it than warm ones. A floor tiled in the afternoon should not be walked on that evening, and a freshly siliconed bath should not be filled to the brim and sat in before the joint has skinned properly. We will tell you when the room is genuinely ready — rushing that fortnight is the commonest way a good job picks up its first flaw.
Leave the silicone alone
Internal corners, and the joint where tile meets bath or tray, are siliconed rather than grouted on purpose: those joints move, and grout cracks when it is asked to flex. Do not pick at it, do not clean it with anything abrasive in the first week, and do not treat a hairline movement line in a corner as a defect — it is the joint doing its job.
Wipe the haze, never scour it
A fine cement haze on the tile face after grouting is normal and lifts with a damp cloth and a proprietary haze remover. A scouring pad will take the haze off and put a permanent dull patch on polished porcelain at the same time — and on a large-format tile that patch will catch the light for the rest of the room's life.
02
Week to week
A squeegee beats any cleaner
Thirty seconds down the glass and the shower walls after use takes the water away before it can evaporate and leave its dissolved minerals behind. Water across Surrey and north Hampshire is hard, and limescale is the main reason shower screens and grout go cloudy. You cannot scrub off what you simply did not leave behind.
pH-neutral, always
Bleach and strong acidic descalers lift the surface of cement grout and dull natural stone permanently. A pH-neutral tile cleaner and warm water handles porcelain and ceramic. If something genuinely needs more, it needs a product chosen for that tile — not the strongest bottle under the sink.
Mind the brassware finish
Chrome tolerates most things. Brushed brass, gunmetal, matt black and other PVD finishes do not: no descaler, no cream cleaner, no abrasive cloth. Warm soapy water and a soft cloth, dried off afterwards, and they will still look right in ten years. It is worth knowing this before you choose the finish, which is why we raise it at design stage.
Run the extractor longer than you think
The fan should keep running well after the shower stops, not just during it. Mould on grout is a humidity problem rather than a dirt problem — it grows on moisture, and no amount of cleaning fixes a room that never dries out. If your fan has an overrun timer, set it generously.
03
Once a year
Seal stone and unglazed tile
Porcelain and glazed ceramic need no sealing at all. Natural stone — marble, limestone, travertine, slate — and unglazed terracotta do, and the sealer wears. An annual re-seal on a stone floor is a twenty-minute job that prevents a stain you will not get out.
Check the silicone before it fails
Look along the joint where the bath or tray meets the tile. Any lifting, any gap, any black speckling means it wants cutting out and redoing. Silicone is a consumable — replacing it every few years is routine maintenance, and it is what stands between a splash and a ceiling repair in the room below.
Service the shower valve
Thermostatic cartridges scale up in hard water and drift before they fail. A shower that has become fussy about temperature, or slow to reach it, is usually telling you the cartridge needs cleaning or replacing rather than that the shower is worn out. Cheap to do on a Tuesday, disruptive to do after a leak.
Feel for a loose tile
Tap along a wall or floor with a knuckle. A well-bedded tile sounds dull; a hollow ring means the adhesive is not gripping behind it. One hollow tile is worth keeping an eye on. A patch of them, particularly in a shower, is worth a phone call.
Worth a phone call
Three things that are not a cleaning problem.
Grout cracked along one straight line
Grout that has cracked in a continuous line — up an internal corner, or in a straight run across a floor — is telling you the substrate is moving, not that the grout was poor. Re-grouting it will crack again in the same place. That line wants looking at properly.
A tray with any give underfoot
Flex in a shower tray, or a stain appearing on a ceiling below a bathroom, means water is getting past something. Caught early it is a seal and a valve. Left alone it becomes a tray, a floor and a ceiling — and then a decorator.
Grout dark only where the water lands
Discolouring confined to the wet zone is normally mould in the surface rather than dirt on it. A mould-specific treatment and a fan that runs longer will usually deal with it. If it keeps returning to exactly the same spot, the joint behind it may be holding water and should be looked at.
If any of those describe your bathroom — ours or somebody else's — ring 01252 725343. Catching the cause is nearly always cheaper than living with the symptom.
Start with a conversation, not a quote.
Ring Andrew on the number below, or send an email with a few photos of the room and rough measurements. The consultation costs nothing and commits you to nothing — and you will know within the hour whether what you have in mind is possible.
We haven't set published opening hours — ring and we'll fix a time that works, at the Farnham studio or at your house.