At lunchtime the bathroom mirror was still fogged from the 6.45am shower, and I remember standing there thinking that this was not a mirror problem. The bathroom had a window and nothing else. Above the shower end of the bath the ceiling had come out in black freckles, which I wiped off every few weeks with a damp cloth and which came back like a rumour.
The survey had said it plainly in October 2024: no ventilation in the bathroom, condition rating 2. We'd put it on the "later" list because nothing was leaking and the peach suite, installed around 1992, isn't going anywhere. That was the wrong list. A window you open for ten minutes doesn't do much when there's a steaming shower and a bath at the same time. On Friday 7 November, the same electrician who did the consumer unit in March came to fit a fan.
What he fitted
It's a humidity-sensing fan, which means it's permanently live and watches the air itself. When the moisture rises, it comes on, and when it falls, it keeps running for a while and then stops. Nobody has to remember to flick a switch, which matters in a house where we both forget. It went high on the outside wall at the shower end, so the duct only has to run straight through the brick.
He arrived at 8.30am, which was perfect for my home day, and was finished by 2pm. First he core-drilled a 100 mm hole through the brick, which is a noise I'd describe as a dentist's drill if the dentist were a very large man. He fitted a short duct and an outside grille, took a supply from the landing lighting circuit through the void above the ceiling, and put a switched isolator outside the bathroom door so the fan can be cut off for maintenance. Then he tested it and left a minor works certificate on the worktop.
The bill was £285. The fan itself was around £70 of that. The rest was drilling a wall, running a cable and the certificate, and I think it's fair. I'd been avoiding the number for months, and it was less than I'd been privately dreading. Because it's an electrical job in a bathroom, we paid someone registered to do it, not Matt with a drill.
The ceiling
On Saturday morning I washed the mould off the ceiling with mould remover, in gloves and goggles, with the window open and the fan humming gently overhead. I left it to dry over the weekend, then gave it two coats of anti-mould paint on Monday and Tuesday evenings. It's too early to say the ceiling is cured. All I can report is six clean days, and a ceiling that looks like a ceiling again.
The fan does appear to be working. A second cheap hygrometer lives on the bathroom shelf now (the first is in the back bedroom), and the numbers tell the story. After a shower the reading used to sit around 92 per cent, and even with the window wide open it was still near 85 an hour later. With the fan it drops back to about 60 within a quarter of an hour. It comes on by itself when one of us turns the shower on, and it sounds like a quiet hairdryer in another room. Matt says he doesn't hear it, which I take to mean he's very tired.
What I'd change
I'd have done this in March. The electrician was already here for the consumer unit, we'd read the survey, and the mould was already freckling the ceiling. I told myself it was one more cost on a very long list, and in the meantime I spent nine months wiping the ceiling. That's the sort of job where the delay costs you something every month, even if it never sends a bill.
The bath grout needs a good look next, since it's gone grey at the edges, but that's a different job with a different budget. For now the bathroom has a working fan, a ceiling that's the right colour, and a mirror that's clear by the time I've finished brushing my teeth.
Brew count: 5.
