Your new freestanding bathroom furniture looks great, just how you imagined.
What's the best way to keep it looking this good for years to come? With the damp environment of your typical bathroom providing specific challenges for bathroom furniture, you'll need to keep to a sensible aftercare regime to maintain your new purchases and get your money's worth out of them.
The high water content of the air in the bathroom and the splashes and drops of water flying around mean there's a higher probability of water damage to wood.
Then there's the usual potential for everyday wear and tear, magnified because the bathroom is one room of the house that's used pretty intensively.
Your freestanding bathroom furniture will need a different approach to aftercare depending on what material it's constructed from.
Wooden furniture requires the most intensive care.
As you've bought it specifically for use in the bathroom, it should be sealed with some kind of protective coating, whether that's wax, oil, woodstain, varnish or polyurethane.
Natural, untreated wood reacts badly when it comes into contact with water: surfaces bubble and pale or dark water marks appear if water is allowed to soak into the surface.
Clean your wooden bathroom furniture regularly.
Use a soft, non abrasive cloth and a non abrasive cleaning product.
This will keep the build up of dirt to a minimum, helping to prevent scratches and stopping dirt getting ground in to the surface.
You should protect wood from excessive exposure to sunlight, heat, and cold, and try to keep surfaces dry as much as possible.
This will be more difficult in certain areas, such as around the basin.
Three or four times a year, you'll need to polish the surfaces of each piece of furniture.
Don't do this more than once every three months, or a film of polish will start to build up, damaging the appearance of the wood.
Check with the manufacturer of your bathroom furniture what finish has been used on your item(s): there are specific polishes for different finishes and you should use the correct kind.
If damage does occur, you may need to sand the wood down and reapply its finish.
Most waxes, varnishes, oils and other coatings can be bought from DIY shops; if your particular coating isn't available and the damage is noticeable enough to mean that you need to take action, you could consider sanding the coatings off every surface and beginning again with a coating which is available to you, rather than mix the old and the new.
With manufactured materials such as MDF, the aftercare mainly revolves around gentle but regular cleaning, and damage prevention.
You should simply dust laminated furniture regularly, to prevent scratches and unsightly build up of dirt, and clean the bathroom furniture with warm water and detergent periodically.
You should take extra care to protect freestanding bathroom furniture which is made from veneer or laminate coated MDF from the surface scratching and chipping which can occur through rough handling.
Although good quality MDF units are reasonably durable and resistant to scratches and bangs, if laminated or veneered bathroom furniture does become damaged there is less scope for repair than there is with solid wood.
Wooden veneer is thin by nature and cannot be sanded back to perfection and re-finished the way solid wood can: if you sand too much, you'll go right through.
If the outer coating of MDF bathroom furniture is damaged sufficiently to expose the inner material, this core material will soak up any moisture in its environment very quickly and can lose both its structural integrity and its looks as a result.
If you take the appropriate steps to maintain your particular freestanding bathroom furniture, its good looks will last you for many years to come.