Green Home Remodel Part Five: The Bathroom

From Yourdailythread.com March 16, 2010 Written by Candice Dickens-Russell

We began a discussion of what makes a home green when my husband and I bought a fixer-upper a year ago. Since then, I’ve shared the details of what we’ve done to keep our green promises in each room, like in the last installment: the living room. And now we move on to the loo.

The bathroom was easily the scariest room of the house when we moved in. We gutted the whole thing (amazingly giving the cabinets away on Craigslist) and started from scratch. Here are ten ways we greened up our redo.

1 )  We chose eco-friendly paint in aptly named Friendly Yellow from Sherwin Williams’ Harmony line, which has a zero VOC base.

2 )  Our 100% cotton curtains came from Target.

3 )  We fell in love with this modern brushed nickel faucet from Moen (link below) and its water conserving technology.  The fact that it’s EPA WaterSense Certified was a bonus. Plus we’ve set the sinks in the bathroom up to drain into a swale in the yard instead of into our septic tank. It’s our version of a greywater system and waters some of the backyard plants.

4 )  You won’t find anything less than 100% recycled content paper products in our home. Seriously, we have no business cutting down trees for this purpose! We’re partial to Seventh Generation’s100% recycled, chlorine-free versions.

5 )  The real show stopper in this space is our dual flush toilet. Duals give you a choice of a full flush for solid waste or a half flush for liquid. Ours is made by Glacier Bay and also WaterSense certified.

6 )  You’ll never guess where we got our beautiful circa 1940s clawfoot tub.  We found it in our backyard! The previous owners discarded it and we couldn’t wait to bring it back in. It still needs to be reglazed, but it was definitely our best freebie find. (The tub also drains out to the swale.)

7 )  All of our bathroom linens are organic cotton and fabulous (found at overstock.com).

8 ) The lovely blue rugs on the floor are 100% recyclable at the end of their life cycles and don’t contain harmful off gassing backings.

9 )  We decided to put polished concrete in the bathroom instead of vinyl or tile for now.

10 )  Our favorite oil painting purchased in a second-hand store to give it a second life.

About The Guest Contributor
Candice Dickens-Russell is the Youth Program Manager and CREEC Coordinator at TreePeople. She has worked as a Secondary Education Program Coordinator for TreePeople’s Generation Earth program and as a youth program coordinator for the Earth Resource Fund in Costa Mesa. She serves on the South Bay Business Environmental Coalition Board, the Green Advisory Board of the California Conservation Corps and the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair steering committee.