Mold Prevention in Your Bathroom

Your bathroom is the room in your home that most people associate with cleanliness, but it’s one of the worst places for you to allow mold to propagate. Along with the kitchen, this is one of the most common places for mold to be found in the home. What can you do to prevent mold from growing in your bathroom? Here are a few tips.

Check the caulking around the bath tub or shower stall and make sure it isn’t cracked, broken, or even missing in certain areas. If you feel cold air coming in through a hole in the caulking, you should re-caulk it immediately.

It’s not uncommon to find mold growing around the base of your toilet, especially if the toilet has overflowed often in the past or worse, if you have carpet in your bathroom instead of tile. Carpet is generally a bad idea in a bathroom unless you’re very diligent in cleaning up spills of water as soon as they’re made.

You want a vent or a fan in your bathroom so that heat and moisture can escape to the outside of the house. Mold grows not only on the floors of the bathroom, but also on the ceilings where water has been absorbed due to the steam of taking a shower being unable to escape the room.

If you can see mold on the outer surface of your bathroom wall, odds are that you’re looking at a mold problem inside the wall, as well, and cleaning the mold off the outer surface of the wall isn’t going to be enough. If you truly want to get rid of all the mold, you’ll want to replace mold-contaminated building materials, except for wood supports. This includes plywood, carpet, papered sheetrock, plasterboard, and etcetera. If your bathroom has carpet in it and you find mold growing anywhere near the floor, replace the carpet.

Whatever you do, don’t try to cut corners by painting on top of your mold problem. Mold eats paint like candy and it’s nowhere near an effective solution. Even paints containing mildicides are not effective, because these are not strong enough to kill toxic mold infestations.

If you leave moist dirty clothes or towels on the floor in your bathroom closet often, expect mold to grow there. Toss your clothes in a plastic clothes basket instead of directly on the floor and this is one of the best things that you can do to prevent mold in the bathroom that most people don’t think about. We tend to let damp or even wet towels stay on the floor indefinitely, especially if we live in busy households. Clean out your dirty clothes bin often, especially if the clothes are wet.


Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
water damage restoration companies and
Dallas Residential Water Damage Restoration Contractors.