The “Green” House Effect

I saw something pretty impressive last night; in fact I saw two things that impressed me. The first was while I was flipping through a copy of Real Simple (my sister gets a subscription every year for Christmas) and they had a feature on sprucing up out-of-date bathrooms.

They didn’t gut them—they worked with the existing major fixtures and replaced the small-ticket items. One of the bathrooms, from the 1970s, was a blast from my past; I well remember bathrooms of neighbors with grass-cloth on the walls, brown fixtures, and Boston ferns hanging from the shower rod. It was supposed to get people in the suburbs back in touch with nature; it was misguided.

The “Earth-tone” aesthetic is definitely long gone, but brown has returned in a big way, so they kept the brown toilet and pedestal sink, but modernized them by adding pale blue wallpaper with a leaf design in gold, white porcelain towel bars, and added some sparkle with a capiz shell mirror in place of a medicine chest. It was bathroom I would be happy to have.

Another bathroom (whose vintage I am putting at late ’50 to early ‘60s) had pink tile on the walls and floor. It looked like Barbie’s Dream House®. They painted the walls a rather bright yellow which made the pink look less bright, painted all the trim in crisp white, added a curtain in mattress ticking stripes, and accessorized in yellow and pink. It went from garish to hip—less like Barbie and more like twenty-somethings who enjoy using the word “retro” as often as possible.

I was impressed for two fairly obvious reasons; they did both bathrooms on a reasonable budget, and they didn’t toss a bunch of porcelain into the landfill. As I mentioned in a previous vent, I am constantly seeing shows in which rooms are stripped to the studs, so it’s nice to see someone try to make the best of what of still serviceable.

In addition to my flipping through the pages of Real Simple, I flipped through the TV dial last night and landed on HGTV which I share a love/hate relationship with. “Designed to Sell” is one of several shows in which a homeowner having a hard time selling their house is given advice from a professional stager.

The homeowners in this case insisted that any changes made to the house prior to sale be as eco-friendly as possible. All the fabrics used for window coverings were organic cotton and none of the staging furniture was produced using chemicals, all of which is nice, but their solution to the problem that was far-too-much mushroom-colored kitchen tile blew me out of the water.

They removed the tile, reserving enough for a single tile height backsplash, and ground the remaining tile into small pebbles. Those tile fragments were combined with cement, sand and water and became the kitchen’s brand new concrete counters. The counters looked fantastic, and when you think about it, what difference is it what the aggregate is made of, when it is used only as a structural element and not a decorative one.

Bring on more of this; those of us who’d like to do better need ideas.