master bath, in progress

Before:

The previous owners added a master suite addition in 2002, a dormer on the second floor. Can a dormer be on the first floor? I dunno. The bathroom was and is huge. I was not a fan of the country kitchen look, deeply paneled cabinet doors, ceramic pulls, 12" x 12" periwinkle floor tiles... but it seemed like a waste of money to change it for only aesthetic reasons.
Glub glub.
Those are my contractor's feet. He wore pointy boots the day we met.

The shower stall the previous owners installed was tiny, with a fiber glass floor. Bryan and I both wanted a tile floor and wouldn't you know it, the only way to tile the floor in the shower was to rip out the whole thing.

So we did. That's Claudio, our tile guy. He does woodwork too.
Holy shit.
In the end we kept two things: the Corian countertop, and the Whirlpool tub.
But Claudio made us a new surround out of teak and these oversized subway tiles I found in our old Brooklyn neighborhood.
The subway tiles are 4" x 16" and cost the same as the usual 3" x 6", around $2.50 per square foot. I could not resist, and was bonus-buoyed by the blurb I'd read in Domino Magazine, something about oversized subway tiles being a future trend to watch out for. Oh I am a happy sheep. Baa. And then I saw in this month's issue, the one with Drew Barrymore on the cover, a bathroom done (or was it a kitchen? Where's my fact-checker?) in the same jumbo subways with green penny rounds like mine. Will there ever come a day when I don't need validation from a glossy magazine? Time will tell.

When our contractor and tile guy suggested a Roman shower, sans curtain or door, and instead simply utilizing a glass block wall, I drooled.

Since we kept the countertop, the only kind of faucet I could use had to fit a 4" span. Not too many choices. I had to let go of my cross-handle dreams, but am happy with this. It's Danze, in case you're wondering about brands.
Enlarging the shower and wanting to keep some symmetry didn't leave much room in the toilet area. (We will be replacing ye olde oak toilet seat cover with a streamlined white one, by the way). Anyway, that square-shaped hole in the wall on the left is our $140 toilet paper cubby, or "niche" if you will, still in progress. I'm thinking about silver leafing it once it's in. Oh I joke. But seriously, I made the mistake of forgetting to ask for a shampoo niche in the shower wall, but when I heard it would be another few hundred to create (and they'd already tiled the wall), I decided that instead, I'm going to buy one of those white resin tree stumps from West Elm and create an ironic comment on outdoor showering, and rest my shampoo on that for half the price.
  See that huge sunflower showerhead? Just like the great outdoors.
My celadon penny rounds. Loving them.
The tub filler matches the sink faucets, and comes with a handheld attachment which, I am sorry to say, leaks. They already sent a replacement part, but as is the way of contracting, it was the wrong part. We are still working on it. We are hoping the next round of shipping will be a success and that any further leakage can be resolved with some Teflon tape.
Almost done. We can't wait to use it. Still waiting for drawer pulls, trim tile, threshold, and other odds and ends, plus fixes for those pesky leaks. Yes plural. The sinks leak too.