Bathrooms

You always hear that kitchens and bathrooms are the most important and valuable rooms in houses, so after we figured the kitchen design out, we turned our attention to designing the bathrooms.
the house has 2.5 bathrooms, with a toilet and sink downstairs, a "guest" bathroom upstairs with a tub/shower, sink and toilet upstairs, and the master bath off of the master bedroom with dual sinks, toilet, shower and soaking tub.   As an added bonus, the basement comes pre-plumbed for a 3 piece bathroom, but we certainly don't need to figure out any sort of design for that right now.

The downstairs bathroom is pretty simple and doesn't have much "design" to it.  Our main goal here is just to make it flow with the rest of the downstairs, so we'll likely just continue the wood floor and paint color into that bathroom.  We briefly considered putting some travertine tile in this bathroom, but at the end of the day we figured that the door to that room would probably be open 95% of the time and it would just look better if we didn't have a transition.   This bathroom will have a pedestal sink, so we don't have any counter/vanity choices to make here.  We like pedestal sinks, but we recently saw a house that had one of those trendy "vessel" sinks in the downstairs bathroom, which I thought was a pretty great idea.  We really like vessel sinks, but we're concerned that they will look dated in 5-10 years.  Putting one in the powder room keeps the "pretty" confined to one small bathroom that will be seen by company, and it will be cheap to change it out when it inevitably becomes dated.  :)

The guest bathroom and master bathrooms are a bit more of a challenge.  Originally we thought we'd just copy the bathrooms from the other house, which done with very cheap beige porcelain tile.   They looked ok, but they were very basic and boring.  After we started looking in tile, I really feel in love with the look of natural stone and I was able to convince Theresa that we should look into incorporating that into our bathrooms.

Brown travertine

As I mentioned previously, we have about 1k to spend on bathroom tile, and since we're upgrading our tile choices, going with stone, etc... it's going to be hard to fit everything under that budget.   If we start to run over, the guest bathroom is going to be where the cuts are made.  Our current plan is to go with the same brown travertine on the floor that we're going to be using for the entryway in the guest bathroom, assuming that it fits in the budget, if not we'll downgrade to porcelain tile, but we don't have anything particular picked out.  The shower/tub surround in this room will also be tiled and we're not exactly sure what we want to do here.  As I was looking at wall tile, I really didn't like the cheap porcelain options.  They look too much like blurry pictures that are imposed onto a hard surface (which, I suppose, is exactly what they are) So I'd like to get something a little nicer here.   We're going to get pricing on putting natural stone travertine (to match the floor) in the tub/shower surround, but I think that's going to be a bit pricey and we'll probably drop that down to a nicer grade of porcelain that is meant to mimic travertine.  If that's STILL too expensive, we might wind up sticking with a cheaper porcelain that fits within our allowance... maybe you just can't afford to upgrade everything.  *shrug*  For the vanity in this room, we'll likely stick with the same espresso cabinet finish, but the granite color might change from a light grey to some shade of brown.   (although that will tweak my inner OCD complex a bit)    This is just the current plan... this is the bathroom that may be subject to complete change.  We like the travertine and would very much like to work it in, but it might push us over budget, or we might decide it simply doesn't work with the more "modern" design of the rest of the house, so we may end up going in a different direction.

Our Quartzite Pattern - Baoding Creme

The master bathroom is where all of the money is being spent :( We definitely don't want a boring, beige, builder quality bathroom!  We want something fun, unique, different and modern... so we're planning on going with a natural stone here as well.   We're thinking about going with a quartzite on the floor and shower walls.   Quartzite is definitely a fun stone, lots of texture and interesting colors, so it definitely won't be boring.  We considered slate, but Theresa didn't like it and I liked it at first... but rapidly changed my opinion.   We're going to stick with the same cabinet/counter scheme from the kitchen here, so espresso cabinets and light grey counter.  The stone will require that it be sealed, and we'll have to be careful that we don't use anything harsh to clean it... .but it should look WAY more interesting than ceramic tile.  All in all the material upcharge shouldn't be TOO bad, because bathrooms are small.  But the variable here is that we don't know how much the subcontractor is going to charge us to install this stuff.  If he ends up tackling on another $3-$4 a sq ft... that may push us over budget and we might have to go with a ceramic backup plan.

Hopefully the mater bath tile looks like this