While the bedrooms and other living spaces can have water damage due to leaks in the ceiling or the floor, but the four rooms just listed are the ones that you need to worry about the most.
There are some things that you can do to prevent water damage in these rooms and none of them are very expensive, unless your situation calls for a complete renovation of the space.
If your bathroom does recall for a renovation, you need to make sure the joists under the floor are not already rotted and weak. If they are, before you do anything, you need to have them completely replaced with new wood.
This will make sure that all your hard work does not fall through the floor after the renovation is over with. Sealing your floor with a waterproof membrane such as Schutler-Ditra can help make sure that water does not seep down to the wood that you are trying to protect.
If grout or caulking is missing without this membrane, then water can get underneath your flooring and to the subfloor, but as long as you have a membrane installed similar to Schutler-Ditra, your floor should be fairly safe. This is also something that you can install underneath your kitchens flooring, even though your kitchen is less at risk than the bathroom.
Another concern in the kitchen and bathroom is the ceiling. Steam from cooking or baths becomes soaked up by the ceilings drywall and it will eventually begin to sag and crack. If it cracks in the middle, you have to replace it, because it becomes a safety hazard.
Mold will also grow on ceiling drywall that absorbs water. One good solution to this is to make sure you have an exhaust system of some kind installed in both of these rooms to remove the excess humidity. In the kitchen, this is built into the range hood a lot of times, but installing a separate one can help. The one you put in the bathroom can have a light built into it.
Other things that you can do to help prevent water damage in these rooms is to make sure that water spilled onto the floor gets cleaned up as quickly as possible, whether the floor is completely watertight or not. Keeping a check on the plumbing can help, as well.
