Lovely! I like the classic white tile and porcelain and how you used furniture pieces in the bathroom. I love that the storage at the end of the tub has pull-outs that can be reached from the toilet. Your custom sink and backsplash and counter are unique and beautiful. Yours may be the first bathroom sink I have seen in which a small or medium dog could be washed! That is a good thing! I showed your pictures to my DH because I am thinking of classic tiled walls with a chair rail for when we redo our bath in a couple of years. He liked it! I was expecting him to say, "too old fashioned." He did not, he said it looked nice. From him, nice is a compliment. He even liked your rows of listello. I was just at the Tile Shop's site the other day looking at the Hampton tiles because someone was selling some on Craigslist. I am hoping to do as you did and get what I can cheaper there, and fill in the rest from the store. I can see that you worked very hard to secure all of your materials - and then cut the floor tiles to size and culled the Hampton tiles, too! You succeeded very well in getting the look you wanted while saving money along the way. Congratulations, and thank you for the pictures and great detail and supply list.

I am sorry to hear you are not happy with this and that it was not made clear to you in advance there would be this height difference. We've also had leveling issues with our house during out remodel last year and had to make some compromises that I did not like and then we had an issue where grout keeps popping out and some broken stone tiles in our entryway because the tile installer cheated one end of the mud bed so we wouldn't have a 2-3" step like yours. So as you can see the other solution would've had a different set of problems..... What is annoying is when these contractors make these decisions for us without consulting us and any fix would be difficult and costly. My "fix" would be to demo the stone floor and either do porcelain or hardwood, neither is acceptable to me so I live with this one section where the grout pops out and make sure no one brings in heavy stuff on my entry floor. I agree, it may be a good idea to take a little break while you absorb this new development, let your contractor know you are disappointed this was not communicated to you ahead of time and ask if there are any other solutions... I would try to get Bill Vincent's (or Mongo's) opinion on this as well. He often frequents the bathroom forum as does a couple other tile installers who can advise you if this is a good install or not or perhaps suggest another option you've not thought of, though of the two solutions mentioned, a step sounds better than a short ramp.

I got the cabinets through Home Depot (20% off) they are not higher end but they have held up extremely well and we’ve been happy with them. I don’t remember the brand, but the color is cognac on maple. They’re standard kitchen cabinets. We got 2 regular drawer banks, 1 extra wide drawer bank, 2 sink cabinets and the closet you can see in the picture for about 1800 w/the discount. We bumped the shower wall 6 inches into the bedroom to make the shower bigger, pulled the cabinets out from the wall a couple of inches to provide more counter top. And curved the edge the counter for interest. Just for fun, this is what we had to start with. The tub was rusted and there were two doors, 1 from the hall & 1 from the master bedroom, we closed up the hall door. I think we got our moneys worth. LOL As for the labor, I found my Contractor through a plumber I had hired to put in a kitchen faucet. I asked if he had someone good he could refer and he referred Matt to me. Matt had his own company but just him and his guys. All of his work was by word of mouth, he didn’t advertise or push for business, he didn’t need to. I think I got fair pricing from him because he didn’t have the overhead a lot of the larger companies might have. He wasn’t the least expensive and he wasn’t the most expensive. Finding someone who was willing to work on our schedule and not having to have it done ASAP is what really helped me to be able to keep our costs at a minium for both labor and materials.

The challenge is that once you get down to 12" deep (or even 15" deep) for a vanity, your sink options are extremely limited, so I don't know how much a custom cabinet would necessarily help on that front (apart from getting you something you like stylistically). Personally I'd rather have at least 18" deep to have a more functional sink and just live with the 30" clearance. For ours we stuck with a standard depth vanity because it's the only storage in the room apart from a medicine cabinet, and losing the 3" by dropping to an 18" vanity wasn't worth the extra clearance for me. if you post your layout you might get some other creative solutions, though.