Tips and Tricks to Handle Windowless Bathrooms

Photo credit: Lachlan Ross/Pexels

VOLUME IX

By Thomas Cochran

When tenants complete a walk-through for a new rental, they’re looking for the pros and cons. Windowless bathrooms may fall into the latter category. The usual gripes are poor lighting, mold, mildew, dampness, off-putting smells, peeling paint and bubbling wallpaper. Use these tips and tricks to get ahead of this complaint.

Ventilation To Fight Against Mold and Mildew

If excess moisture is allowed to build up and linger in a windowless bathroom, it can cause mold and mildew to form. Excess moisture and poor ventilation can then lead to health issues and costly repairs.

Off-putting smells often also plague windowless bathrooms with poor ventilation. The good news is that a vent fan can be installed in any bathroom to decrease moisture and improve air quality.

There are a wide range of bathroom vent fans to choose from, but they all need to be left on long enough to do their job. Property owners should suggest to their tenants to leave vent fans on for at least 15 minutes after a shower to properly remove moisture from the room.

If mold or mildew is forming in a windowless bathroom because there is no vent or because a tenant doesn't use the vent fan properly, install a vent fan with a humidity sensor. These fans will automatically turn on and off when an unacceptable amount of moisture in the air is recognized by the sensor.

Avoid Peeling Paint and Wallpaper

Another way to prevent mildew from forming in a windowless bathroom is by using mildew-resistant paint on the walls. Improving the ventilation should do most of the work to prevent mildew, but using this type of paint will add another level of protection.

Wallpaper can also be used in a windowless bathroom—with a caveat: wallpaper and humidity do not mix. But if moisture is properly managed, then wallpaper should work well. Landlords can even experiment with different wallpaper samples to see how well they hold up before committing to wallpapering the entire room. (For pickier tenants who may or may not like the wallpaper samples, tempaper is another option that can easily be put up and peeled off.)

Photo credit: Terry Magallanes/Pexels

Lighting for Accuracy

Clothing retailers often end up with returns due to poor lighting in their stores. People simply do not know what they really look like until they step outside and get a better view of their appearance. The reason for this is because of the Color Rendering Index (CRI) of light. CRI measures how well a light bulb or natural light can illuminate the full spectrum of colors. Natural light does a better job of this than artificial lighting, which is why clothes look better (or worse) outside than they do inside the store.

The same is true in windowless bathrooms. The light bulbs that landlords choose in these spaces can determine how polished the bathroom looks and how well tenants look in them. If a windowless bathroom has poor lighting, then choose white light bulbs with a CFI of 90 to 100. This rating means that the light emitted by the light bulb is similar to that of natural light, which will help colors look their best when the lights are on.

These tips above should be helpful in improving lighting, avoiding ventilation risks related to mold and mildew, and assisting with interior design upgrades like wallpaper and paint. Hopefully, this will make the space brighter and more inviting, and win over prospective tenants who are on the fence about signing the lease.

Note from the Editor: Vol. IX

In every issue of Go4Rent Magazine, we try to bring the best out of property owners and Realtors. In Volume IX especially, we’re all about helping you cross your t’s and dot your i’s.

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