Whole bathroom resealing

The bath and the shower get looked at. The ones that are usually worse are the back of a basin where a toothbrush glass sits, the bottom edge of a tiled splashback, and the joint along a tiled window board, which takes condensation off the glass every winter morning.

A whole bathroom booking covers all of them, which is most of its value. It is also why it takes an afternoon rather than an hour, and why doing them together costs less than doing them one at a time.

A bathroom with black joints reads as neglected even when the room is clean, because it is the first thing the eye lands on. Clean white lines round everything read as looked after. It is the cheapest change to how a property presents that exists.

For end of tenancy work the photographs matter as much as the work does. Every joint is photographed before and after as a matter of course, and the set goes over by email, which is often what settles a deposit question months later.

Failed grout. Grout and sealant fail differently and get confused constantly. Sealant is the flexible joint where two different materials meet; grout is the hard fill between tiles. If water is going through a grout line, resealing the perimeter changes nothing.

A room with a ventilation problem. If there is mould on the ceiling and up the walls, the bathroom is holding humidity and the joints are just where it shows first. You get told, with the usual causes, rather than being booked in again next year.

Bathrooms end up with three different colours of sealant in them, because each joint was done by a different person on a different day. Clear round the basin, white round the bath, and something greyish round the shower where somebody used the wrong tube. It is the sort of thing you cannot unsee once it is pointed out.

Doing the room in one visit is the chance to fix that. White is the usual answer, because it reads as part of the sanitaryware and it hides a tile edge that is not quite straight. Clear suits dark tiles, stone and any room where the tiling is the feature and the joints should disappear.

It is your choice and it costs the same either way. The only case where the answer is not free is a room with both white sanitaryware and dark tiles, where the bath usually wants white and the shower usually wants clear, and that is worth two minutes of conversation before anybody opens a cartridge.