Paint or tile bathroom walls?

Flamingo_2

We are redoing our bathroom and are not too sure whether to paint or tile the walls. Obviously we plan to tile the shower / bath area but were considering tiling part way up the wall all the way around the room - finishing with a glass border, and painting top part of wall .
However, we're now considering not tiling and just painting the remaining walls (with a splashback behind the sink).
Does anyone have any advice? I'm concerned that if we paint the walls we might get mould growth (ventialtion isn't brilliant in the bathroom) but tiles would add to the overall cost. Decisions, decisions..... any advice would be great.
Thanks

cally1_2

I prefer the tile where necessary and paint everywhere else. I think it looks nicer.

R&C

We are doing half and half. As you walk in we'll be having the bath at the end of the room, horizontal up against the back wall. The basin and WC are on the right hand wall. Both of these walls (back and right) will be tiled and then the wall to the left will be part tiled as the end of the bath will be sitting up against it. The rest of the left hand wall will be left painted, as will the wall with the door on.

Hope that makes some sort of sense!

I would either do it this way, or tile it completely. I'm not particularly keen on just tiles around the bath and a splash back above the basin. We have that at the mo and it looks quite boring! Although saying that we have plain white tiles so that is probably why!!

bungle4x4

tile it, and buy british!!

And yep i work for a british tile maker

eco-friendly_2

Does anyone have any advice?

Half tile can look fine, install an extractor fan.

rachbc

we are tiling to dado height all around the room and painting above, and tiling full height around the shower- I think all tiles looks a bit hard and cold, plus i can change the paint colour very easily if i get bored

Meadows

You can use an anti-mould paint to put on before the final paint colour, this stops any mould growing.

When we moved into our house 9 years ago there was Tiles & Paper on the walls. The paper was coming off due to the moisture so we stripped the papered walls and used the mould paint and then painted the walls with bathroom paint, and never had a problem with mould. (I have re-painted since 9 years ago lol).

I also recommend a good extractor fan in the bathroom.

tori.k

you will need an extractor we half and half tiled but never got round to fitting the extractor fan result black ceiling and paint pealing off the walls due too to much moisture..taught me a lesson

usignuolo

We tiled all the way up on the two walls which contain the bath with shower at one end. However this was half and half two different colours above and below. Then the bottom half tiles we continued round the bottom half of the remaining two walls.

We used a Laura Ashley waterproof small patterned paper in coordinating colour to upper tiled walls on untiled upper walls. (One of these has a window and the other has the washbasin and a mirror. So we made sure the lower tiled half wall bridged the gap between top of washbasin and bottom of mirror). It looks very nice.

One point - you need to find a way to cover join where bottom of wall paper meets top of tiles if you do this. We used one of the special edging tile strips to do this.

sec79

I would just tile where needed, and then paint. My bathroom is fully tiled with the small white bog standard white tiles (already done when I moved in) and I curse every time I clean it, grout!

When I can afford it the bathroom is going to get redone - half paint and half tile. If you paint you can always paint it a different colour if you fancy a change aswell.

Gimlet

We tiled all 4 walls from the skirting boards up to around picture rail height. It looks amazing and is so easy to clean in comparison to painted walls. It did cost a lot more than a couple of tins of paint though.

I vote all tiles :beer: