Bathroom, bathroom, bathroom

We spent 2.5 hours at the bathroom fixture place today. Who knew that there were so many choices! And such a wide price range. It's probably a good thing that our bathrooms are compact - it forced us to limit our search.

In the end we figured that we'd cut out the bathtub from the master ensuite in favor of a BIG shower. Probably not the best decision when it comes to resale value, but that is clearly not the point here. We're putting a nice deep soaker-type tub in the kids bathroom, so that makes up for it (we're going without all the fancy schmancy whirlpool jets, etc) .



Faucets was another eye-opening experience. This is where we could have easily bankrupted ourselves. Some of those faucets are works of art, and when you start looking at the finishes, you could lose your mind! Gone are the days of chrome, chrome and more chrome. Now we have stainless steel, brushed nickel, oiled bronze, venetian bronze, and chrome. We priced out the shower in our bathroom and for the same system we were looking at more than a $500 difference based just on the finish! In the end we cheaped out. It's hard to justify such a crazy expenditure when we're looking for a way to cut costs. For the kids tub and sinks we're going with this:



And for the ensuite shower and sink, this type of thing:



The coolest part is that we're getting a rain shower head that will come down from the ceiling as well as a typical shower head. Very cool!

I should clarify something here. These are the choices we made based on what we think we can afford and what we think we want. We haven't got the final pricing yet. Kathy (the woman at the store) told us that if the quote makes us nauseous we can always "reassess". Let's hope that we don't have pull the Gravol out at this early stage!