Charles Middleton wrote:

Dear all,

Another one of my questions.....

I am about to start painting my bathroom. Do I really need to use special
bathroom paint or will any old emulsion suffice?

Chatting in the pub the other night the theory was that if I didn't use
bathroom paint then the moisture in the bathroom would penetrate the
standard emulsion into the plaster and give me possible damp/mould problems.

Has anyone any experience of using either bathroom / standard paint in
bathrooms and what are the effects?

Thanks in advance,

CM.



I used standard cheap magnolia emulsion (which was what was already
there) onto plasterboard and it's been fine. Of course, being
plasterboard it doesn't suffer so badly with condensation problems, and
the bathroom rarely gets very steamy (bath only, no shower) - the d/g
window steams up, the mirror steams up, but never seen any moisture on
the walls/ceiling, and the window's always open a crack to vent the damp
air.

A smaller bathroom is likely to have more problems than a bigger one
(volume of moisture in the available air - reaches saturation point
faster?) IMO, but that's just my opinion. I don't have an extractor fan
but the bathroom is relatively large (you could get four baths into it
though nothing else - two side by side, two turned 90 deg side by side
but on the ends of the original two) - it has the combi boiler in there
too which means it's got some level of heat input off and on other than
the (mostly off) radiator.

Velvet