Meet my Ugly Green Bathroom

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.

Anyone like green? You know you’re jealous — it’s like peeing inside a lumberjack’s shirt.
Wow. Just wow.

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.

A teensy bit better with no wallpaper and a shower curtain.

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!

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12 thoughts on “Meet my Ugly Green Bathroom”

  1. We have yet to fully renovate a bathroom, but we’ve done a kitchen and a complete insane basement gut and refinish job. We have, however replaced both of our toilets. I would highly recommend you carefully measure the size constraints of your new toilets. The low flow one we have upstairs now doesn’t have a big tank on the back so it looks weird and shrunken, like a dwarf toilet. The other toilet my husband thought would be better if it were oval than round, and in the ridiculous tiny-ness of the half bath, it looks ginormous. So. We have proportion challenged toilets. Also, if you have hard water, even white toilets look dirty when clean. Unless you viciously attack them with limeaway and a scrub brush. Good luck!

    1. Great tips, thanks! My husband would probably WANT a giant toilet, since he’s 6’4″… However, since it will mainly be used as the kid bathroom for Jack, a giant toilet would be a bad choice!

  2. Julie: If your funds are limited, I did recently see an advertisement in one of those annoying coupon mailings,Val Pak, I think, that come to the house daily. They should end up in the recycling without opening, but I just have to open them because of this feeling that I’m going to miss some deal of the century! But, maybe you can now start opening those things! OR, I can check on Angie’s list if you want! Have fun. Our kitchen is under going a huge remodel so I can relate!

    1. Hi Barb – I actually looked into the bath fitters advertised in those cheesy mailings and they were way more expensive than you would have thought! I think once the rest of the bathroom is improved the tub won’t look so bad anymore. At least, that’s what I hope…

  3. I totally feel your pain. My walls are flesh-coloured, in that crayola 24-pack kind of way. But you’re on your way – it’s already looking better without the wallpaper. Maybe we should start a support group…

  4. could you post a better photo of the toilet, I have a client looking for the disconnected teal toilet offered by koehler and would be willing to purchase maybe even the pedestal

  5. We’ve been looking at houses and I have seen some HORRIBLE bathrooms. I’m a lover-of-all-things-pink and I’ve seen some WAY-OVER-PINKED bathrooms. Pepto Bismol Pink is not high on my list of toilet colors.

    1. Oh yeah, the one-colored bathrooms of the early 80’s were… interesting. I’ve seen them in pink, blue, yellow and light green — with everything matching, including the toilet, tub and hex tiled floor. Blegh!

  6. I have the same Kohler teal, I think it looks great. You should change the tile, it doesn’t look good against the white backround. This color was known as a high fashion Kohler color and it was expensive. I used teal tiles with a gold polished brass trim , Kohler fixtures and a green granite top over a mahogany cabinet.

    Dan

    1. Well, that certainly proves that everyone likes something different! I’m glad you’re enjoying your teal bathroom but I am very happy to keep mine covered with a shower curtain! =)

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