A DIY art project idea: colorful, decorative… toilets!
At the ReStore, we not longer accept donations of non-ADA porcelain toilets because we already have SO many traditional toilets available for sale! Our stock is all in great working condition and you can find our vast selection in our outdoor sales area behind the ReStore (walk through the showroom and into the warehouse, near in the end, take a right and go out the doors).
Buying a toilet from the ReStore is a great way to keep them out of landfills and to live a commitment to recycling and reusing. But what about rethinking toilets as works of art? Porcelain is a wonderful medium for paint and stickers, and a toilet from the ReStore can become a show piece in your bathroom with some inspiration, imagination and excellent art supplies in the form of paint and brushes or stickers.
We’ve put together some of our favorite examples of working art toilets here, to give you ideas for creating something of your own.
For instance, toilets can be decorated in an ornate Mexican Talavera style. These intricately decorated, very colorful toilets sell for several hundreds of dollars online - if you don’t believe us, search online yourself!
There are other historical designs you could choose to undertake, inspired by Art Deco, by Victorian wallpaper with decorative borders and symmetry, by Art Nouveau, by psychedelic design themes and more.
If you have the skills and the right tools, you can create your own version of such - though yours will be made with the addition of paint that’s appropriate for porcelain, while, the ones you see online and the example we have here are baked in a kiln, making the colorization permanent.
But decorative toilets don’t have to be quite so complex and intricate in their re-imagining, and there are more simple designs that most anyone can undertake.
Looking online, we found some beautifully painted toilets with much more simple designs, usually with a fish, marine or sunflower or other floral motif, but also with nautical themes - even some that are a bit fun and silly, such as anime or vintage computer game images.
There is a lot of free advice, easy to find online, about the best paint to use for your porcelain thone-related project. An art store might also be able to help you choose the most appropriate paint, the best brushes and other tools for your own DIY decorative toilet project.
And remember: you can just focus on decorating the lid, even just the outside of such - you don’t have to paint or decorate the entire toilet to create something much more eye catching than a plain white toilet.
If you feel you have no painting or drawing skills, you still have options for decorating! We also found stickers for sale online that are especially for toilets, and lots of examples of what the finished work can look like.
Most of the stickers that we found for toilets had designs that centered on birds or flowers, and the choices of different color schemes is impressive.
Whatever DIY project you undertake, if you get the toilet or any other items from the Forest Grove ReStore, we want to see photos - the finished project, absolutely, but photos from during your design process, and narrative about what you’ve done and why you made whatever design choices you made, would be welcomed. You can send such to photos@westtualityhabitat.org.
One more note: we also found toilets as artwork used for fundraising! For instance, in association with World Toilet Day, November 19, a global recognition day held every November as a way to bring awareness to the billions of people who don't have access to clean sanitation, a toilet-painting contest was held in Perrysburg, Ohio. Two teams from the University of Toledo, two teams of 50-plus students from Perrysburg High School and a solo artist from Ottawa Hills High School participated. The public then used online voting to choose a favorite, and once a winner was decided, they auctioned off the toilets. The winning artist got to choose a charity of their liking for half of the raised money in the auction to go to, with the other half going to water.org, the official organizing agency of World Toilet Day.
Could we have such an event at the Forest Grove ReStore? We would love to! We certainly have more than enough toilets ready to be decorated! And in looking through our archive of photos of interesting things sold at the ReStore over the years, we found a very artfully decorated toilet sold at our store once upon a time!
If you would like to take the lead as a volunteer on coordinating an event similar to the one held in Perrysburg to help raise funds for West Tuality Habitat for Humanity and our home-building and critical home repairs program here in Western Washington County, please email us at development@westtualityhabitat.org and tell us about your idea. We would love to work with you and other volunteers and partner organizations to make it happen!
former Forest Grove mayor and long-time Habitat supporter and advocate Richard Kidd gets ready to toss a corn hole bag, while standing next to a toilet painted in ReStore green.
And note: this isn’t the first time we’ve had this idea for decorating toilets: back in 2019, we held an outdoor customer appreciation event during the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of our enterprising volunteers re-imagined two toilets from our stockpile in ReStore-themed green! We then used them as targets for our parking lot corn hole competition that day (we called it the ReStore Toilet Toss).
At left is former Forest Grove mayor and long-time Habitat supporter and advocate Richard Kidd getting into the action. Unfortunately, no one on staff knows what happened to this work of art! If you know, please email us at marketing@westtualityhabitat.org (and if you have more photos from this very memorable day, let us know!)
