Renovating Your Bathroom in Spain — What You Need to Know Before You Start

Spain is a wonderful place to live. But if you’re renovating a property here, there are a few things about Spanish construction that will probably surprise you — and not always in a good way. Bathrooms in particular tend to hide some nasty surprises once you start pulling tiles off. Here’s what we’ve seen over and over again, and what’s worth doing properly the first time.

Waterproofing — or the lack of it

In the UK and much of northern Europe, waterproofing a bathroom is just… standard. You tile over a waterproof membrane, especially in the shower area, floor to ceiling. It’s not even a question.

In Spain, it often simply doesn’t happen.

We’ve stripped out bathrooms where the tiles came off and behind them was bare plasterboard — completely saturated, black with mould, falling apart. The water had been slowly soaking in for years through tiny gaps in the grout, around the shower tray, wherever it could find a way. By the time you notice something’s wrong, you’re usually looking at a full gut job.

What’s actually under your tiles

We once removed a bathroom floor and found the tiles had been laid directly onto sand. No screed, no proper base. Just sand. It sounds unbelievable, but we’ve seen it more than once. The whole thing had to come out and be done from scratch.

Even in relatively new builds, it’s common to find builders have cut corners on materials you’d never normally see — the stuff hidden under and behind the finished surfaces. This is exactly why a bathroom renovation isn’t just about choosing nice tiles. What goes underneath matters just as much.

Electrics — sockets and safety

Modern bathrooms need power points. A hairdryer, an electric razor, a heated towel rail (more on that in a moment). And yet we regularly walk into bathrooms — sometimes in quite large, well-presented properties — with no sockets at all.

When there are sockets, they’re often not protected by an RCD (a residual current device, or differential circuit breaker). A standard breaker in your fuse box only trips when current exceeds a certain level — like in a short circuit. But if you get an electric shock in a wet bathroom, the current through your body might not be enough to trip it. An RCD detects even tiny leakage currents and cuts the power almost instantly. In a wet room, it’s not optional — it’s basic safety.

If you’re renovating, it’s absolutely worth having the electrics looked at and done properly. We have a separate electrical cost calculator if you want a rough idea of what that involves.

Heated towel rails — go electric

The Costa Blanca is on the coast, which means humidity. Towels don’t dry here the way they do in a drier climate — or sometimes they don’t dry at all. Mould in wardrobes, damp in walls, that general feeling that nothing ever fully dries out — it’s something most people living here know well.

A heated towel rail makes a real difference in a bathroom, and our recommendation is always to go electric rather than plumbing one into your hot water system. Water-fed towel rails only work when hot water is running through them, which means running your boiler just to dry a towel. They also require pipework, and the connectors on many of them — even from decent brands — are not great quality. We’ve seen them leak inside walls.

An electric towel rail just needs a single socket in the right place. Easy to install during a renovation, cheap to run, and no pipework to worry about.

The pipes behind the walls

Something we find regularly when opening up bathroom walls: pipes in poor condition. Previous builders either didn’t wrap them before tiling over them, or used materials that didn’t hold up. The chemicals in cement and tile adhesive are actually quite aggressive, and over time they can attack copper joints and fittings — leading to slow leaks inside the wall that you won’t notice until the damage is already serious.

When we open up a bathroom, we always check the state of the pipework. If it’s not good, it needs replacing — not patching. We typically recommend copper over plastic for water supply pipes; copper handles pressure better and lasts longer in conditions like these.

Drainage is the same story. Pipes need to be properly joined and glued with the right PVC adhesive. Simply pushing one pipe into another — which we see more often than you’d think — is asking for trouble once it’s all sealed behind tiles and screed.

The short version

If you’re renovating a bathroom here in Spain, these are the things not to cut corners on:

• Waterproofing — do it properly, especially in the shower zone. Use moisture-resistant board behind the tiles, not standard plasterboard.
• Check all pipework before tiling over it, and replace anything that’s not in good shape.
• Electrics — make sure they include proper RCD protection and enough sockets for how you actually live.
• Towel rail — if you want one, go electric.

None of these are glamorous. You won’t see them once the bathroom’s finished. But they’re the difference between a bathroom that works well for ten years and one that causes you headaches in two.

The calculator gives you a ballpark figure. The real number comes after a site visit and proper measurements — which is something we’re always happy to do.