Make Your Shower Seat Easy to Clean

Shower seats are a nice convenience. They are helpful if you cannot stand for long periods of time. They are useful for shaving legs. And they make great places to keep lots and lots of shampoos, conditioners, sponges, and whatever else enhances your shower experience. But don’t make your shower seat a condominium for mold to inhabit.

I always recommend that shower seats and benches, especially steam showers, be solid underneath. They should not be a simple shelf. Shower seats should be a box without open space beneath.

Why do I say this? After all, you might prefer the look of a simple slab floating in the corner of the shower. That’s a nice look from above, but not so nice a look from underneath. If left open below, the underside of a shower seat is the perfect place for mold and mildew to grow.

Mold and mildew absolutely love warm, moist places. Warm, moist air rises. As such, it collects up under things. Did you ever notice that the underside of your roof overhang gets mildewed? It never gets rained on. How could it grow mold? It’s the warm moist air rising and collecting beneath the overhang.

That same thing happens under your shower seat, but on steroids. If you just have a slab of stone imbedded into the wall, steam and humidity will collect under, creating luxury accommodations for mold and mildew to grow. Usually the underside of a slab of stone is unpolished and not smooth. There of plenty of nooks and crannies just waiting for mold to move in.

Consider also that the space under a shower seat is hard to reach making it an easy place to overlook when cleaning. I think it’s better to make the seat be a “filled in” box with no open space below. Put a tile facing on the front that goes all the way from the seat to the floor and then put the marble or granite slab for the seat on top of that. You’ll be glad you did in the long run.

I hope this information is helpful to you. You might want to get yourself a copy of my best-seller, Designing Your Perfect House. It is chockfull of valuable tips and advice that will save you many times the cost of the book on your house building or remodeling project. You might also like The Well-Centered Home: Simple Steps to Increase Mindfulness, Self-Awareness, and Happiness Where You Live. It will show you how to make your home a happy place.