Since moving into our new house early this year, I’ve been attacking each room like a home décor wildebeest. We’ve painted a few rooms, purchased some new things and DIYed a bunch of stuff, but there is still a ton of work to do.
Today I want you to meet the ugliest room in my entire house (it’s worse than the stinky basement): my ugly green bathroom.
It’s so ugly.
And so green.
And I hate it.
I hate it with a white-hot passion… or maybe it should be green-hot? Either way. Not. A. Fan.
Through the nastiness, there are a couple things that aren’t so bad – there is a halfway decent looking floor and good space to work with. Oh, and it’s clean. That is a huge improvement over some other bathrooms we saw when we were looking at houses.
You have to admit, it is pretty hideous though. What’s funny is that my ugly green bathroom was actually done that way on purpose by the previous owners of my house. The teal green pedestal sink* is Kohler, as is the matching teal green toilet. In fact, the bathroom “designers” were so nice as to leave us a replacement toilet seat (still in the packaging). You know, in case we somehow broke ours and wanted to replace it with another teal green seat.
Oh and did you notice that the bathtub is also teal green, with an oh-so-attractive frosted sliding glass door?
Yeah. It’s a freaking forest in my bathroom.
As an added bonus, whenever you clean the toilet, the cleanser leaves a ghostly white film in the inside of the green bowl. So it’s ugly AND looks dirty… even when it’s clean.
Oh, the horrors!
You’ve probably come to the same conclusion that I did: rip it all out and burn it!
So that’s what we’re going to do. The first thing to go was the wallpaper. I am not a fan of wallpaper in general and this wallpaper seemed particularly offensive to my eyes. Look closely – it’s a horrible plaid with khaki and hunter green. Yes, more green. What the heck is up with the all the green??? Did the previous owners have some sort of fetish about peeing in the great {plaid} outdoors?
Whatever. It’s gone. We had a friend remove all the wallpaper from the entire house back when we moved in. Also, as a temporary measure to make the bathroom a little less dreadful, I hung a shower curtain OVER the glass door. It was just an old curtain from our last house, so it was totally free to stick it up.
The only other change we’ve made in the past 6 months is that I got rid of the matching green accessories. Oh yes, there was a matching toilet brush, holder AND a matching plastic trashcan. Apparently, when you go with teal/hunter/ugly ass green, you really GO WITH green!
Besides our little changes, my plan of attack has been to just avoid that room altogether. We don’t have a ton of extra money right now to totally gut the place. Originally we were just going to paint it a complimentary color and call it a day, but I decided that I just can’t live with that.
So now that our schedule has slowed down a little, it’s time to focus on the ugly green bathroom.
Ugly Green Bathroom To Do List:
- Take down the icky glass doors.
- Sand and paint the walls.
- Replace the shower hardware with something of better quality, including a handheld shower head so I can wash Jack easily.
- Remove the broken hooks on the back of the door and replace with pretty ones.
- Remove the medicine cabinet/lighting fixture.
- Remove the teal green toilet.
- Remove the teal green pedestal sink.
- Stalk the clearance center at Reico for a new vanity and sink.
- Install new vanity and sink.
- Possibly replace floor.
- Buy and install new sink hardware.
- Find a cute mirror and hang it over the sink.
- Buy and install a new lighting fixture.
- Buy and install a new toilet.
- Put up new shower curtain.
- Buy and put up new artwork.
That should do it. As much as I’d like to replace the ugly green tub, that is going to be a budget buster. I’ve looked into one of those bath cover systems, but they’re super expensive. I also thought about trying to just pop out the tub and put a new one in its place, but apparently that is only possible inside my head.
So, it looks like we have some bathroom fun coming up in our future.
While it’s nice to have a list of things I plan to do, it’s also a bit intimidating that there are so many things that have to be done. Oh and everything costs money too, so who knows how quickly this project will be completed. Maybe I should send out a tweet: Will Write for Bathroom Fixtures!
Have you done a partial bathroom renovation? If so, do you have any tips you’d like to share for saving money?
UPDATE: Apparently this post comes up a lot when people are searching for replacement Kohler toilets in green/teal… so I’ve gotten a bunch of emails over the years asking to purchase my toilet. Sorry guys, I got rid of the toilet in 2012!
*I googled the pedestal sink and toilet (which is how I found out they call the color “teal” instead of “ugly ass hunter green”) and they apparently were sold for $563.00 and $417.00!
