Bathroom Upgrade

So when we moved into our house we found out that the subfloor in our upstairs master bathroom needed to be replaced - apparently the toilet had leaked at some point. So try finding a reliable contractor when you've just moved to a new state, know no one, and have never owned a house before! We've been waiting MONTHS now for our contractor to show up and do the job. The upside though is that its given me time to research green flooring solutions.

The bathroom really needs an overhaul - its original (picture lots of blue tiles, dated fixtures). There are lots of great natural stone options which are eco-friendly, but the rub is that we don't really have the funds to give the bathroom the full treatment yet and stone is expensive. So we needed a cheap solution to fix the floor so we don't end up in the kitchen one morning while sitting on the toilet upstairs.

I was just going to go with vinyl/linoleum since we'll be ripping it up in a few years anyway. But then I was watching some home improvement show and learned about marmoleum made by Forbo. Its made out of all natural materials, is no VOC and comes in tons of different colors and patterns. We found a vendor near us on the Forbo website and went down to the showroom today. We found out you can order it in sheets (like linoleum), tiles, or click panels (similar to the popular click wood flooring). We picked a color that we liked which came in all three options so we choose the one that was cheapest - the click panels (this will depend on the size of your room). For a 45 sq. ft. (with extra for trimming) room we paid about $450 with tax and shipping. I thought this was pretty reasonable given some of the other estimates we'd received for other non-green products.

We're also going to buy a new showerhead. I read about a few good options for low flow showerheads on treehugger and decided on the Bricor. The prices are reasonable (starting at about $35), and they have options that go as low as about .5 gallons per minute (compared to other low flows of 2.5 gpm). I've read you can only order these from the company directly. Once we get it, I'll post more about the order process and how we like it.