How to Choose the Best Type of Bathroom Flooring
Introduction
Choosing the best type of bathroom flooring for a bathroom makeover or whole-house interior redesign is an important decision to make.
There are so many different types of flooring solutions for bathrooms, wet rooms, shower rooms and toilets out there that picking the right one can feel overwhelming at times.
Moreover, choosing the best bathroom flooring for your specific space is essential in order to avoid expensive maintenance or replacement costs further down the line.
The bathroom flooring you choose for your home improvement project should not only match your budget and style, but be practical and safe for all the family, too.
6 Things to Look For in the Best Bathroom Flooring
Before we take a look at the 4 best types of bathroom flooring, it’s important to talk about what you should be looking for when browsing.
Durability
As with any renovation material, you want a bathroom flooring which will stand the test of time.
Elsewhere in the house, durability can be less of a primary concern, but with humid, damp, dirty, and heavy-foot-traffic areas like your bathroom, it is key.
Look for warranties on bathroom flooring options, as well as resistance ratings against things like damp, water, mould, and mildew. Also keep an eye out for famously sturdy materials like porcelain.
Waterproofness and slip resistance
Naturally, whatever bathroom flooring option you settle for must be highly resistant to water, if not 100% waterproof.
This is to ensure that it doesn’t warp or become damaged by the water in your bathroom, but is also to stop pockets of damp forming around the room or worse, the foundation beneath the floor from becoming damaged and unstable.
Similarly, slip-resistance is key, since you’re liable to be moving around your bathroom whilst you or the floor is still wet. Porcelain tiles, for example, are naturally porous and so slip-resistant, whilst luxury vinyl flooring is as well.
Protect yourself and your family from unnecessary falls by looking for bathroom flooring options with slip resistance.
Resistance to stains
This property may not seem quite as pressingly important as the first two, but it is still worth considering.
Keeping bathrooms clean is the bane of all of our existences, and so it’s worth taking the time to find a flooring solution which can doesn’t stain easily and is a breeze to clean.
Some materials are better for this than others. For example, porcelain won’t stain and is easy to keep clean, whilst laminate can stain fairly easily if spills are not mopped up promptly.
Maintenance requirements
Different types of bathroom floors have different maintenance requirements, from sealing or not, to how you keep them clean and how often you need to clean them.
Depending on the level of effort you’re comfortable putting into your new bathroom design, you may want to prioritize low-maintenance bathroom tiles like those made of porcelain, or high-quality vinyl tiling which doesn’t require sealing.
Ease of installation
If you’re doing the bathroom renovation yourself, then it’s well worth finding a bathroom floor which you have the chops to install.
Some types of bathroom flooring are much easier to install than others, such as laminate and LVT, whereas tiles for bathrooms can be much trickier, especially where they require precision cutting.
Cost
Finally, as with any home renovation, you should also consider the cost of various bathroom floor types.
Some are considerably more affordable than others, and whilst affordability is never a sign of poor quality, at Tile Merchant, cheaper bathroom floors may require additional maintenance to ensure their effectiveness in damp and humid rooms.
4 Different Types of Bathroom Flooring to Choose From
Take inspiration for your bathroom flooring ideas by diving into this list of the top 4 best types of bathroom flooring, handpicked by the knowledgeable sales team here at Tile Merchant. All of the materials listed below are bathroom-friendly and can spruce up any toilet or shower room, regardless of décor, taste, shape, or size.
Large-format porcelain tiles
Undoubtedly one of our most popular bathroom makeover materials to work with is porcelain.
Our extensive range of large-format porcelain tiles covers everything from the basics – like simple muted colours and stone effects – to the drop-dead luxurious, like our marble-effect bathroom tiles.
Porcelain is naturally water-resistant and anti-slip, making it a winning choice for wet rooms. It’s also super durable and long-lasting too.
The long, slender lines of these large-format tiles also help to draw the eye across your interior space, making even the smallest bathrooms look like kingly palaces.
Vinyl flooring for bathrooms
I think we’d all love some gorgeous wooden flooring in our bathrooms, but wood tends to make for a rotten (excuse the pun) choice in damp environments.
The extra layer of protection is usually a heavy film covered with a UV-cured urethane that makes it scuff, stain and scratch resistant.
Thank goodness, then, for luxury vinyl wood-effect planks! This stunning alternative looks indistinguishable from the real deal, yet is 100% waterproof, more affordable, and longer-lasting. Browse the range today and pick the wood finish which best says "you"!
Wood-effect porcelain tiles
It’s not just vinyl flooring that can effect a woody presence in your bathrooms, shower rooms, and toilets. Introducing our ever-popular wood-effect porcelain tiles for bathroom floors.
From oak and walnut to richest ebony, smoky grey, and sun-bleached white, our porcelain wood-effect tiles are waterproof, resilient, and slip-proof whilst looking just like real wood.
Tiles that look like wood are a fabulous way to replicate the cosy vibes of a Scandinavian sauna from the comfort of your bathroom.
Laminate bathroom flooring
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our most affordable type of bathroom flooring: laminate.
Laminate has come a long way from the sticky, tacky, cheap-looking floors of our childhood school memories. Today, our laminate offers a premium quality flooring solution to those of us on a budget, yet still looking to elevate our interior design.
We’ve got dozens of different wood tones, effects and finishes of laminate flooring for you to choose from, perfect for matching your new bathroom floor to the aesthetic you’ve worked so hard to create around the rest of your home.
In fact, our laminate flooring offers the single biggest diversity of colours and wood-effects out of any of our bathroom flooring options. Laminate floors are reasonably easy for a DIY homeowner to install.
The only thing crucial to remember if choosing laminate for your bathroom is that it is not 100% waterproof, and extra care will need to be taken to clean up any spills as otherwise the flooring will stain.
Conclusion: Best Type of Flooring for Your Bathroom
Choosing the best type of bathroom flooring depends entirely on your taste, style, budget, and the dream bathroom design you have in mind.
All of the 4 types of bathroom floors discussed above are reliable, practical, and – in our opinion – truly gorgeous.
Browse our full range of flooring options today, and discover for yourself the key to unlocking your best bathroom look yet! Don’t forget, we also stock bathroom wall tiles, accessories like mirrors and towel rails, shower fittings and more!
FAQs
If you’ve ever uncorked a bottle of wine before then you’ll know that cork has water-resistant properties. It’s also resistant to mildew and mould and as such, can most definitely be installed as flooring in your bathroom. However, though water-resistant, cork is not waterproof, meaning that it can still allow water through to the floor beneath. You should therefore seal cork flooring in bathrooms with a topcoat of polyurethane upon installation, and then every 5-10 years afterwards.
Laying vinyl floor tiles in a bathroom is a little more complex than installing them elsewhere in the home, due to the various obstacles you’ll have to cut around, such as your toilet and sink. Working from the centre of the room, first ensure the sublayer onto which the tiles will be laid is both even, clean, and waterproof sealed. Next, begin laying the tiles by applying adhesive to the dried sublayer. When you reach obstacles or corners, use a cardboard template to identify the shapes you must cut into your tiles before cutting and installing them. Use a roller to press the tiles into place and finally wipe them down with a lightly damp cloth to remove any adhesive which has come through the cracks.
Laminate flooring is a really gorgeous and budget-friendly type of bathroom flooring which can help you spruce up tired old shower rooms and toilets on the cheap. However, a little extra care is required when maintaining laminate bathroom floors, especially with regards to spills. These must be cleaned up promptly, otherwise they will permanently stain your laminate flooring.
Here at Tile Merchant we help lots of customers all across Ireland find the perfect bathroom flooring for their particular taste of interior design. Each customer prefers a different style of bathroom flooring in keeping with the rest of their home’s aesthetic. However, if we were to select one type of bathroom flooring which is most popular right now, we’d have to say large format porcelain tiles – they simply never go out of fashion!
Most flooring options for bathrooms should be designed durable and strong enough to withstand heavy daily use from the people in your household. None of the materials we’ve recommended above for use as bathroom flooring options are liable to crack. If you’re unsure about the durability of your preferred bathroom flooring, ask in store or online at tilemerchant.ie.
Both vinyl flooring and laminate flooring can make excellent flooring options for your bathroom. However, due to its 100% waterproof properties, we have to say that LVT flooring, or vinyl flooring, is best.
Depending on the material you use for your bathroom floor you may or may not need to add an additional protective and waterproof layer of sealant. For example, porcelain tiles are naturally waterproof and require no sealing, whilst ceramic tiles may well need waterproofing. Similarly, cork and would require waterproofing, whilst LVT or laminate would not.
The qualities you should look for in a good bathroom floor include its resistance to water, scratches, and stains, as well as its durability, ease of maintenance, and installation requirements.
We might be biased, but we’d have to say that the best waterproof laminate to use in your bathroom is the laminate flooring we stock here at Tile Merchant. It has a high water-resistance rating, is super affordable, and comes available in a wide range of styles and finishes to suit any Irish homeowner’s interior design tastes.
The most waterproof type of bathroom flooring is either LVT (luxury vinyl tile) flooring or porcelain tiles. Both porcelain bathroom tiles and vinyl bathroom flooring are 100% waterproof and as such ideal for most bathrooms in Ireland.
You can of course opt to install almost any material as flooring in your bathroom, including wood. However, because wood is naturally susceptible to water ingress, damp, mould, mildew and fungal growth, it is highly recommended that you avoid using it for bathroom flooring. If you do want to use wood in your bathroom design, you must make sure it is fully-sealed and resealed regularly.
All of the types of bathroom flooring we’ve discussed above are safe and practical to use in your Irish home. The safest bathroom flooring is one which is waterproof and slip-resistant, which truly encompasses porcelain, LVT, and laminate bathroom flooring.
The type of bathroom flooring which is “best” will really depend on individual taste, budget, and bathroom renovation requirements. Where wood-effect porcelain might be just the ticket for the urban Irish homeowner hoping to replicate the relaxing feel of a log cabin in the woods, a nice mute laminate might be preferable for someone on a smaller budget who wants to keep the aesthetic of their bathroom minimalist and muted.
Why Tile Merchant?
We offer extremely competitive pricing on our entire range of tiles and likewise. We stock a huge range of wall and floor tiles and our prices are competitive for retail and trade. Our stock is widely available in our tile stores in Dublin and Ashbourne (Co. Meath) which are open 7 days a week.
Alternatively, if you’d prefer to shop our tiles online, we can supply you with samples delivered for free.
Article written by Tile Merchant