At least it's just one room..

Although, it is one of the more important ones...

I've been stressing out lately as I'm watching the house start to come together.  I'm really wondering if our finish and design choices could have been better.  For the most part I think they are ok, and some things are turning out REALLY REALLY good (the entire kitchen and guest bathroom, laundry room tile, closets, interior doors) but some things I'm not so sure about (paint color, wood floor color, brick) so it's both exciting and nerveracking to see it all blend together until you start to see a finished  product emerge.  Exciting because this is the culmination of everything you've been obsessing over, and nerveracking because... well you had your shot to make it perfect and maybe you didn't do as well as you could have...

Luckily, while I don't think everything turned out *perfectly* I do think that almost everything (so far) has turned out at least pretty well.  With one exception... the master bathroom.

The tile did not look like this on the sample board

The list of things I don't like about the master bathroom is long and detailed.

1. From the beginning we didn't like the layout of this bathroom very much at all.  At this point I simply cannot remember why we didn't speak up about it.  We definitely had an opportunity to change it when we first sat down and looked at the architectural drawings, but for whatever reason we were timid or accepting and our attitude was one of "we don't like it, but we like everything else so we'll deal with it"  HUGE mistake.  The bathtub is too big, the shower is too small (not to mention weirdly shaped) and the placment of the shower is just flat out WRONG.  It's adjacent to the master bedroom and the door to the bathroom opens directly into it.  (pet peeve of mine).  This REALLY ticks me off because the single most important thing I cared about when building this house was the shower.  I really wanted my perfectly sized shower and what I got was so FAR removed from what I wanted that it's like really craving pancakes for breakfast and being served a wall clock.  Not even the same general category.    
2.  The construction isn't all that great.  It meets code, but it was definitely rushed in spots and some corners were cut.  The rough plumbing was a jagged mess, the framing isn't completely level and plumb (in fact that is so bad that a glass installer we had take a look at the shower said he would be unable to even make fabricate a door, although I think his problem was mostly with the weird shape) and the material choices are cheap.  (greenboard instead of cement board?  Really?)
3. The tile is AWFUL.  This one is squarely on us, but the tile we chose did not turn out well.  It's FAR more red than we anticipated, it doesn't go well with the granite and it's much much too "busy" for how much of it there is.   It's almost seizure inducing. 
4. Our shower door isn't in yet, but I'm getting the impression that it might not turn out well.   

 There are a few things I like about how it turned out.

1. The vanity "corner" is just about perfect
2. We were smart enough to wire it for cable and in ceilng speakers
3. The overall size 

Hey, the one area I like!

.I feel like this is the biggest area where we failed in our design and our direction to the builder.   So, while the bathroom is by no means unlivable, it isn't what we wanted and I get a little sinking feeling whenever I walk into it because I think that when you build a house from the ground up, you really should end up with something you love through and through.

Theresa is just stressed out and doesn't want to deal with it, but I'm a bit different.  When I see a problem, I have an obsessive need to "fix" it.  I can't fix this, at least not right now but imaging how I *would* fix it is almost as good.

So... as silly as it sounds... I'm already putting together plans to redo it, move the pieces around to a better layout, add some cool features, add more storage, etc... .  Probably not right away, we'll see how the current bathroom works out in practice but I'm going to have my "perfect" bathroom planned out, ready and in my back pocket if we decide to pull the trigger someday.   It's actually been a lot of fun planning everything all out.  Luckily... we didn't spend much money "upgrading" this room and a lot of the money we did spend (fixtures, etc..) would be reused in the redesign,  so the only money we would have "wasted" is the $600 we spent upgrading the tile.

We certainly have better things to do with our time and money immediately, but maybe in a few years I'll start itching for a project.  Or maybe we'll decide that the we don't mind the room so much once we start using it, or maybe the house will settle funny and the tile will crack and we'll be forced to redo something...  Who knows.  It's just fun to think about!

I hate whoever designed this shower with the firey intensity of 10,000 burning suns