.House Tour { Part 3. Bathrooms & Laundry}.

Time for another house tour post! If you missed them, the first two posts are here and here.

So, I thought I'd show you around the wet areas today - bathrooms & laundry.

In the first house we built, I found choosing tiles to be such a nightmare. We went tile shopping every Saturday for 6 weeks until we finally settled on something! This time around though, we knew exactly what we wanted and our tile shopping lasted less than 1 hour!
This is our ensuite. For the tiles, we choose a matte-finish grey rectangle tile and used that one tile everywhere - floors and walls right up to the ceiling (that's why our tile shopping was so fast!)

We wanted to keep the bathrooms uncluttered, simple and open and using a single tile helped to achieve that. I always thought that showers like ours in the ensuite with a single panel of glass and no door would be cold and draughty. Now that I have been using the shower for awhile I am completely sold though. I don't find it cold at all and cleaning the shower is a breeze. After the tiles are dry, I vacuum the whole bathroom (even into the shower) then mop the entire floor. Cleaning the tiles and shower area is really easy because there aren't any grooves or edges on the shower door or surrounding frame, so it is really just a quick wipe down and scrubbing in the grout if needed. Then the glass is just like cleaning a big window. Bathroom cleaning is one of my least favourite jobs but this shower makes it a little bit better!

Another thing I really like about having matte tiles in the bathrooms are that they dry super fast. An hour or two after having a shower the tiles are completely dry in the bathroom - including the ones in the shower. The great thing about this is that it means that water isn't sitting on the tiles, in the grout and the corners of the shower for as long and reduces the amount of grime and scummy buildup in the shower. I have been pretty slack at cleaning the showers in this house for that reason - they hardly ever get dirty or grimy because the water dries so fast. Big win!!!

 The kid's bathroom is pretty similar to the ensuite. We used the same vanity, basins, taps and shower heads. This bathroom has an enclosed shower with a door though (not as fun to clean! In hindsight, I probably would have done the same shower as in the ensuite) and the addition of a big bath. The kids love it.

In our old house we had a heated towel rail in the bathroom and got them again for this house. It is so nice to have warm, dry towels in the middle of winter. Some days it can be so cold and dull that the towels don't even dry between showers and there is nothing worse than trying to dry yourself with a cold, damp towel after the shower! It's a little luxury that we love now!

And lastly, this is the laundry. We kept things all white in the laundry to help give a sense of cleanliness...because the reality is that my laundry NEVER looks like this! There is plenty of colour and texture introduced in baskets and piles of washing waiting to be washed, folded and ironed!

Because the laundry is an internal room with no windows to the outside, we decided to put a big skylight in the roof. It makes such a difference to an internal room to have a shaft of light and sunshine flowing into the room.

The laundry has cupboards galore - the top ones are hardly even filled up yet. But it is such a great feeling knowing that there is plenty of room to store everything in the house. The tall cupboard on the right is great for keeping mops, brooms, etc.

You can see the window to the left of the room which looks into the garage too. We did that to let in a bit more light and open up the room some more. 

The floor in the laundry is polished concrete. Again, a really easy flooring to keep clean.

It's taken me 3 months to get this far in the house tour so by the time we have been in here for a year maybe I will be finished!!! Stay tuned!