Improved Toilet Layout- Cost of Renovation

There has been numerous inquiries about the cost of renovating the toilet.

However, there are a few assumptions before sharing this information:
1. Do bear in mind that this was priced in end 2009 and offered as part of a complete renovation package.
2. Excludes demolition works and installation of all other toilet accessories.
3. Toilet is approximately 4.8sqm in floor area

a. S$1700: To Supply and Lay ceramic floor tiles c/w water proofing (Material cost up to $3/ft2)

HDB renovation- toilet floor waterproofing

For your information:
water proofing needs to be done under the toilet floor tiles. The failure of this waterproofing is often the cause of a wet/ leaking toilet roof between neighbours on the upper and lower floor.

b. S$1500: To Supply and Lay glazed wall ceramic tiles including low wall @ 1 toilet (Material cost up to $3/ft2)

HDB Toilet- Wall tile near completion

c. S$920: To supply and install 1500mm wide vanity top c/w integrated Bowl
d. S$820: To supply and install 1500mm wide suspended cabinetary c/w mirror panel door (Material soild ply/Laminates)

HDB toilet- Vanity Top and Wall Mounted Cabinet Construction

Improved Toilet Layout- Feedback Dec 2012
Wet Floor Toilet Design
Improved Toilet layout

Does the Refrigerator need a Plinth?

Do you need to create a plinth for the refrigerator? That was one of the "minor" points my ID was trying to play down and convince me to avoid the plinth. His argument was that without the plinth, it was easier to roll out the fridge to clean up the dust behind.

As the end-user, my concern was to address the case when the kitchen floor gets flooded from the washing machine malfunction, it would damage the fridge's electrical circuits. Read about front load washing machines having this risk here. "But that is a 1:1000 chance of happening", he argued back.  I figured he was trying to find the easy way out, as without the plinth, the tiler will have a much easier time. Click here to read the reasoning. Anyway, to cut the long story short, I won the debate, which I now am glad having doing so. To protect the washing machine from the flood, we have also placed the rubber blocks to raise it above the floor.

Fridge on a plinth, adjacent to stacked drier on Washing machine which is on blocks.

Washing Machine on blocks

After moving for 2 and a half years, the "1:1000" incident happened... the kitchen floor was flooded when the water discharge tube from the washing machine was accidentally pulled out of the house outlet pipe.

The fridge on the plinth and washing machine on blocks were safe from the flooding. The only thing to handle was cleaning up the flood. Snapped some photos while moving the washing machine and drier out to clean up the wet floor. All these effort to prevent permanent damage to the fridge and washing machine.... I'd say it is worth it.

1. Shifted out the drier and washing machine
2.  Create a temporary extension plinth to roll out the fridge (using newspapers and plywood shelf board)

Note the concrete tiled plinth on the left. Fridge has a white wheel and black adjustable leg. 

3. Roll out the fridge to access the kitchen outlet.

 4. Clean up the kitchen outlet

Kitchen water outlet was located under the fridge. All the flood water was discharged through this outlet. Also note the back of the fridge (on the right) has a lot of electrical works, vulnerable to flooding.

In conclusion, while making design decisions for your renovation, do consider some worst case situations, especially if they can cause some form of permanent damage to your assets.

Also see kitchen layout

Wet Floor Toilet Design

Its been 2 years since our renovation has been completed. If you have been following on our choice of "Improved Toilet Layout", we chose to have a common standing area for the sink and bath zones. Thus our toilet does not have a Dry or Wet floor area.

The floor is always wet. Unfortunately, we have also not picked a floor tile that was sufficiently rough. As the result, the floor is slightly slippery when wet. "The solution was simple", I thought. Just get a floor mat!

My first mat choice was a perforated foam mat, supposedly made in Germany. It seemed to have a lot of friction when I tried it at the hardware shop, which obviously did not have a wet floor. But after the first trial, where I simulated a "slip" under wet conditions, it proved to be still slippery. No Go.

My second attempt was a mat made from hard plastic strips. it worked! Paid about S$40 from Homefix for a standard size.

Why it worked: I supposed the reduced contact area from the black strips allowed water to trickle through. In addition, the reduced contact area created a larger friction force against the black strips and the wet toilet floor. To verify this, a control test was done by pushing the mat on the wet floor with my hands, it slipped. I tried the "slip", that is with my body weight on the mat, which passed with flying colours. You may be interested to know that for the foam mat, the results were the exact opposite. There you go Physic fans!

After the toilet wash, we would stand it up in the corner of the toilet to allow the water to dry off completely to prevent floor staining. From the following photos, you can see the black strips that provides good friction against the wet floor.

Also see Improved Toilet Layout- Costing of Renovation
Also see Improved Toilet Layout- Feedback
Also see Improved Toilet Layout

Floor Tile Selection

As usual, we did some casual research on a few type of flooring available.

1. Natural stone
The 2 common type are marble and granite.
Marble was our favourite as my partner and I both loved the wavy natural patterns and cool feeling of marble. But marble is probably the most "capital intensive" and high maintenance of all our options. It needs to be polished every few years to maintain its glossy look, each costing about S$200 plus (depending on floor area) and major furniture shifting. Marble is also more susceptible to staining from deep coloured drinks like red wine.

Granite on the other hand is extreme durable but cheaper than marble. Our problem with granite is that the patterns did not appeal to us very much. Granite patterns are usually speckled and it looks too heavy for our theme of Classic European


2. "Man-made" stone
Commonly known as Homogeneous tiles. These are factory-made tiles compressed under high temperature and pressure into form and pattern. we learnt that homogeneous tiles come in a large range of qualities. Not that we understood how to tell the difference. Homogeneous tiles comes in a large variety of patterns and are known to be more durable and easy to maintain than marble. Plus it is a fraction of marble price.
3. Laminate
If you have seen our blog, the pre-renovation was using wooden laminates. the system consist of interlocking wooden panels that is laid on a tile or concrete slab surface.

Conclusion
Considering the functionality over ascetics, budget over luxury, we picked homogeneous tile. We had 1 young boy and another one coming then. Milk spillage and crayons is something marble cannot withstand.

However, we choose as big (600mmx600mm) a homogeneous tile size as possible from a pattern that resembled marble. That's as close as we can get to marble... ...