Green board in Maltese bathrooms: what it can do

Green board — moisture-resistant plasterboard, the sheet everyone recognises by its colour — is the default specification for bathroom ceilings and bathroom stud walls in Malta. That default is sound. It is also routinely misread. Green board resists humid air. It does not resist running water, and buying it does not mean the shower wall is dealt with.

What Maltese suppliers actually say it is for

A Haz-Zebbug supplier positions its green CoreX board as board for internal areas with high moisture, mainly bathrooms. The same supplier lists a separate exterior board, BoardeX, for facades and for areas with direct water contact. That distinction is the whole article in one line: green board is for the moist room, exterior board is for the wet surface, and a bathroom usually contains both conditions.

The ceiling above a shower sits in steam. The stud wall between a bathroom and a bedroom sits in steam. Green board is the right call for both. The plane that water physically runs down is a different problem.

What the two grades cost in Malta

Two Maltese sellers publish sheet prices, and they publish them differently.

The useful comparison is the one made like for like. At the hardware shop, in the identical 1.2 x 3 m size, green costs EUR 7.36 more per sheet than white — about 47% more (our arithmetic). Spread across the 3.6 m² a sheet covers, that is roughly two euro a square metre of board area. On a bathroom ceiling of a few square metres, the entire material uplift for choosing green over white is trivial against the cost of taking a stained ceiling down again. There is no sensible argument for white board in a Maltese bathroom.

The online store's figures cannot be converted to a per-square-metre rate, because the listing does not state sheet sizes. Treat the two rows above as two separate data points, not as a range.

Exterior board at EUR 33.00-33.74 a sheet is roughly three times the top of the moisture-resistant range on the same listing. That price gap is why it belongs only where it is genuinely needed.

Where green board is the wrong board

Exterior-grade board is specified for facades and for areas with direct water contact. In a Maltese context that means the soffit of a covered terrace or a washroom off a yard — positions where the board sees weather, not just vapour. Malta's building stock, with its flat roofs, open wells and semi-external service areas, produces more of these borderline locations than a British reader expects. A ceiling in a yard-side washroom is not an internal ceiling, and green board is not the material for it.

Inside the bathroom, the limit is not the board at all. Behind the tiles in a shower or a wet room, a Maltese waterproofing contractor applies flexible waterproofing layers beneath the tile or coating. Where mould already exists, it is removed before the waterproofing goes on — patching over it is not a method. That work is priced as a fixed package after a site inspection, so there is no published figure for it, and it is a separate line from your gypsum quote. If you are being quoted for a boarded bathroom and nobody has mentioned the membrane, ask who is doing it.

Extraction is part of the specification

Reg. 13(3) of LN 227 of 2016 allows toilets to be mechanically ventilated. That provision is why internal, windowless bathrooms are normal in Maltese apartments, and British arrivals often meet one for the first time here. It also means the fan is doing the job a window would otherwise do.

The practical consequence for gypsum works: a boarded bathroom ceiling with no working extraction will hold steam against the board after every shower. Green board tolerates humidity; it is not designed to be a permanent condensation surface. If the extractor is to be ducted above a new false ceiling, the duct route needs to be agreed before the ceiling is closed, because afterwards it means cutting.

The headroom rule works in your favour here

Reg. 15(1)(b) of LN 227 of 2016 sets a minimum clear height of 2.40 m for non-habitable spaces — and expressly allows bathrooms to be lower, along with stores, walk-in wardrobes, lift shafts and engine rooms. Bathrooms are also excluded from the definition of habitable space altogether.

In plain terms: a dropped bathroom ceiling is lawful even where the same drop in a bedroom would not be. That matters in Maltese flats, where soil pipes, cistern feeds, ducting and the extractor all want to run somewhere, and where concrete-slab construction gives you nothing to bury them in. The bathroom is often the one room where you can lose 200 or 300 mm to a bulkhead without a planning argument. Confirm the figures against the legal notice for your own project rather than relying on a contractor's recollection.

Buying in shell form, and buying in a block

Property sold in shell form arrives with no ceilings and no partitions, which is the cleanest case: the bathroom gets green board, the membrane goes in before tiling, and the extractor duct is planned with the ceiling rather than after it.

In an apartment, works that touch common parts — a duct through a shared shaft, a penetration into a party structure — are governed by the condominium rules under Cap. 398, not by what the contractor thinks is reasonable. Settle that before anyone orders board.

In Gozo, every delivery is a ferry crossing. Order board in one run rather than three, including spare sheets for cuts; a bathroom is a small, heavily cut room and offcuts mount up.

The installed price nobody publishes

This site's rate card carries a line for a moisture-resistant bathroom ceiling, priced per square metre, with no band attached to it. What it records instead is the material — green board at EUR 11.22-18.80 a sheet — and the note that labour is quoted on site.

That is not an evasion, and it is not unique to us: no Maltese installer in these sources publishes an installed per-square-metre price for a moisture-resistant ceiling. The reason is in the room. A bathroom ceiling is a few square metres with an access panel, several downlights, an extractor penetration and perimeter cuts on every side. The labour does not scale with area the way a bedroom ceiling does, so a square-metre rate would mislead in both directions.

What you can price in advance is the board, and the board is the cheap part. Finishing over it — ready joint compound and plaster of the kind Maltese suppliers stock for the purpose — and the waterproofing beneath the tiles are the items to pin down in writing before work starts.