No two rooms in your home are exposed to more potentially-damaging elements than your kitchen and bathroom. Your bathroom is exposed to constant moisture as a result of showering and hygiene routines, and your kitchen is exposed to constant airborne elements as a result of cooking.
Over time, such elements can seriously degrade the materials found within your kitchen and bathroom. While some people may get away with just a little mold, others can experience more dangerous growth, physical deterioration, and other forms of more harmful damage.
To make sure that you don’t let your kitchen or bathroom don’t get to a place where they start experiencing these types of problems, read below to find out how to properly maintain them.
Water-Resistant Materials
The best way to avoid damage from happening in the first place is to equip your bathroom and kitchen with water-resistant materials. Actually constructing these rooms with water-resistant materials is obviously the best way to do this, but this is often out of the question for most people who are moving into a prebuilt home or apartment.
Instead, a more cost-effective and less-destructive approach to equipping your rooms with water-resistant materials is to find a place offering ceramic coatings in Jacksonville. Whether you opt for a place offering interior or exterior ceramic coating in Jacksonville, it doesn’t matter–all that matters is that you find someone who can coat your bathroom and kitchen with a water-resistant coating.
This is a great way to help your rooms deter moisture and not incur all of the extra costs of completely reconstructing your kitchen and bathroom with more water-resistant materials.
Non-Scuff Materials
Prioritizing non-scuff materials is more applicable to your kitchen than your bathroom, but they can certainly still be helpful in your bathroom as well. Using “non-scuff” materials just means materials that won’t easily show signs of wear and tear from things like chopping, shifting plates around, and other kitchen-related activities.
You can make your kitchen scuff-proof either by opting for sturdy materials or by outfitting your kitchen with the right color of paint from any store offering ceramic painting in Jacksonville, Fl. While the right paint won’t stop scuffs from happening as well as the right sturdy materials, it will help hide any scuffs that occur.
Proper Ventilation
By far the most damaging element to your kitchen and bathroom is moisture. Too much moisture can lead to the development of harmful bacteria and mold, material damage, and all sorts of other hard-to-deal-with pains.
The problem with moisture is that it’s a natural byproduct of things like showering and cooking. With this in mind, instead of deterring the production of moisture, it’s better to invest in proper ventilation that can help move excessive moisture out of your bathroom and kitchen. This way, you can continue to use these rooms as much as you would like, confident that you’re not leaving destructive pockets of moisture in your wake.
Moisture in your home can also result from things other than showering and cooking; it can also result from the weather outside of your home. This is especially true in a tropical or subtropical climate like that found in Florida, where heavy humidity can make its way into homes and further contribute to moisture-related damage.
This is why it’s so important to not just prep the interior of your home to combat moisture, but also the outside of your home as well. As a good first step for the outside of your home, it’s wise to invest in a roofing coating in Jacksonville.
Beyond this, you should make an exerted effort to properly seal any entrances where moisture could make its way into your home. The biggest vulnerabilities include your windows, doors, and ventilation openings. If you’re not sure how to do this, you can have a professional come and properly seal your home for you.
Regular Cleaning
Even the most well-constructed and equipped homes experience moisture-related damage from time to time. The key is to not allow this damage to evolve, which is why you should incorporate weekly, if not daily cleaning into your schedule.
For example, if you notice that there is some sort of growth beginning to form on the roof of your shower, then it’s best to deal with that growth immediately before it can develop into anything more dangerous. Different kinds of growth will require different cleaning methods, but if it’s black mold you’re dealing with–one of the most common types of mold found in showers–then a simple application of any store-bought mold-remover ought to do the trick.
Ease of cleaning is yet another reason why you should prioritize water-resistant materials like those mentioned above. Where mold can deeply embed itself into materials like wood, which makes it harder to clean, mold has a much harder time penetrating materials like tile, which can require a simple wipe to clean.
Takeaway
Whether you’ve just moved into your dream home, your first apartment, or just renovated your kitchen and bathroom for the first time, you don’t want to let your rooms go to waste because of a simple lack of maintenance. To make sure that this doesn’t happen, be sure to adhere to the guidelines detailed above.
Proper maintenance starts with outfitting your kitchen and bathroom with the right water-resistant materials. If you don’t have the privilege of being able to choose what your rooms are made of, then a layer of water-resistant finish can go a long way. Beyond this, proper ventilation and sealing around your home can help ensure that damaging pockets of moisture don’t develop, whether as a result of your doings or the natural climate of your area.
Worst case scenario, if signs of damage do begin to show, dealing with them as quickly as possible can make sure that the damage doesn’t evolve into anything more serious. For example, mold in your bathroom, which is often the most common form of damage you’ll come across, can often be dealt with in a matter of minutes with the right cleaning products.