Looking after your tiles and grout.

Start here, because this single point is worth more than everything else on this page combined. Almost everyone treats bathroom mould as a cleaning task. You scrub it, it looks good for a fortnight, it comes back, you scrub it again, and you conclude that mould is just what bathrooms do. It is not. Mould grows because the room stays wet, and the reason it keeps coming back is that scrubbing does nothing whatsoever about the wetness. Make the room dry properly between uses and the mould has nowhere to live, and you will find yourself cleaning a bathroom about a quarter as often.

Drying properly means three things and they take about a minute a day between them. Run the exhaust fan for a full 20 minutes after the shower rather than flicking it off as you walk out, which is what nearly everyone does and which is almost worse than not running it at all, since you have vented the steam into the ceiling space and left the room wet. Squeegee the screen and the walls, which takes fifteen seconds and removes more water than an hour of fan. And leave the door open afterwards.

This is more of an issue in Wagga than most places, and the reason is our winters. From May through August nobody in this town is opening a bathroom window, and quite reasonably, it is frosty out there and the room is already cold. So the bathroom stays damp for hours after every shower, every day, for four months a year. That is the mould's entire opportunity, and the fan is what takes it away. If your fan is a rattly old thing that barely moves air, or it vents into the roof cavity rather than outside, that is worth fixing before you spend another dollar on cleaning products.

What to clean with, and what will wreck it.

Most tile damage we see that is not structural was done by a cleaning product. The offenders are consistent:

• Acidic cleaners. Many bathroom descalers, lime removers and yes, vinegar. Acid attacks cement-based grout, etching the surface and leaving it more porous every time, so it stains faster and holds more moisture. A weekly vinegar routine is quietly destroying the grout it appears to be cleaning.
• Abrasive powders and hard scourers. These scratch glazed and polished tile surfaces permanently, and once a glaze is scratched it holds dirt and never looks clean again.
• Bleach as a mould strategy. It bleaches the mould you can see and leaves the roots in the grout, so it returns and often darker. It also degrades silicone over time.
• Steam cleaners on aged silicone. Fine on tile, but they will lift and destroy silicone that is already near the end of its life.
• Pressure washers at close range outdoors. They strip grout straight out of the joints, creating the exact gaps you spend the rest of your life trying to avoid.

What actually works is dull: a pH-neutral tile cleaner, hot water, and a soft brush for the grout lines. For stubborn mould, use a dedicated mould treatment, apply it and let it sit for the time on the label rather than scrubbing. The chemistry does the work if you give it time, and you are not grinding your grout away in the process.

Sealing: worth doing, but know what it does.

Seal cement-based grout, and be clear about what you are getting. A penetrating sealer does not waterproof anything. Your membrane does that, behind the tiles, and no bottle from a hardware store is a substitute for it. What a sealer does is make the grout less absorbent, so it stains less, holds less moisture and cleans more easily. That is genuinely useful and worth the hour.

The schedule: shower grout every two to three years, floor grout about every five. It is a $30 bottle, a small applicator and an afternoon. Epoxy grout does not need sealing at all because it is non-porous by nature, which is exactly why we suggest it for shower floors and heavy-use areas even though it costs more to install and is harder to work with. If you are already retiling, the epoxy upgrade on a shower floor is one of the better small decisions available to you.

Silicone is scheduled maintenance, not a repair.

This is the item people misunderstand most. Silicone in an internal corner is not a seal that failed, it is a movement joint that reached the end of its life, and it was always going to. The two surfaces it joins move relative to each other, which is precisely why they are joined with something flexible rather than grouted rigidly. Over time silicone loses elasticity, shrinks and splits. Five to eight years in a Wagga shower is normal.

This is not a detail we invented. AS 3958.1, the Australian Standard guide to the installation of ceramic tiles, requires flexible movement joints at wall-to-floor and internal vertical junctions, around the perimeter of a tiled area, and at any change of substrate, for exactly this reason: tile, render, timber and slab all expand and contract at different rates, and a rigid grouted corner has to crack somewhere. The silicone is engineered to be the part that gives. Understanding that changes how you treat it, because a perished joint is not a fault to be annoyed about, it is a consumable doing precisely what it was specified to do. The joint that matters most is the one where the wall meets the floor inside the shower, since that is the junction AS 3740 is most particular about on the waterproofing side too.

When it goes, it hands water a direct path to the membrane, at the wall to floor junction, which is the exact place where wet-area failures start. So the correct model is a service item on a schedule, like brake pads, not a repair you do when something breaks. Put it in the calendar at six years. Re-siliconing a full bathroom is a few hundred dollars, and it is the single cheapest thing you can do to get your membrane to the far end of its 25 to 30 year range rather than the near end. Our tile and regrout repairs covers it, and how long tiling really lasts has the full set of service lives.

The maintenance calendar we would put on your fridge.

• Every shower: fan for 20 minutes, squeegee the screen, door open.
• Weekly: pH-neutral cleaner, soft brush on the grout lines.
• Every 2 to 3 years: re-seal cement-based shower grout.
• Every 5 years: re-seal floor grout. Check external movement joints and perimeter sealant.
• Every 5 to 8 years: re-silicone all internal corners. Non-negotiable.
• Every 8 to 12 years: full regrout of the shower, $600 to $1,200.
• Immediately, always: a cracked tile. It is an open path to the membrane and it is $120 to $280 to replace, against a $7,000 room.
• Annually, 30 seconds: tap the shower tiles listening for drumminess, and look at the skirting in the room behind the shower. Our warning signs guide explains what you are listening and looking for.

Outdoors: keep the water moving, keep the joints alive.

External tiling in Wagga has a different enemy, and it is frost. Around 30 to 40 nights a year we drop to or below zero, and water sitting on an outdoor surface overnight in June is the mechanism behind most external tile damage here. So the aftercare is about drainage rather than cleaning: clear leaves and debris out of drains, channels and grates before winter arrives, and make sure water is actually running off rather than pooling in a low spot.

Check the movement joints and perimeter sealant every couple of years, because UV destroys sealant outdoors faster than anything else, and a perished joint on a Wagga alfresco lets water into the bed just in time for the frost season. Wash with a pH-neutral cleaner and a soft broom, not a pressure washer held close, which blasts the grout out of the joints. See our outdoor and pool tiling page for how these areas are built to handle the swings in the first place.

The worked example: what maintenance is actually worth.

Two houses in the same Lake Albert street, both inside the Wagga Wagga City Council area, both bathrooms tiled in 2004 by competent tradespeople, both to the same standard. House one: the owner ran the fan properly, squeegeed, sealed the grout a few times, re-siliconed at year six and year thirteen, and regrouted at year ten for $850. Total maintenance over twenty years, about $2,100. By 2024 the bathroom was still sound and on track for thirty years, and it is still going now. Every dollar figure on this page is stated in 2026 money, matching our 2026 pricing guide, so you can compare them against a quote you get today.

House two: no fan habit, no sealing, silicone never touched, and a cracked floor tile that sat there for three years. Total maintenance, $0. In 2024 they had a failed membrane, a drummy shower base, a damp patch in the hallway robe and a $7,800 strip and retile, plus an insurance conversation that went nowhere because the perished silicone made lack of maintenance an easy argument. Same build, same street, same climate. About $2,100 and a habit with a fan bought a decade of bathroom, and that is the entire case for this page. If you want the numbers behind either path, the Wagga tiling cost guide lays them out, and if you are already past the point where maintenance helps, a free measure will tell you honestly.