Yes, the beadboard should be brought above the vanity. This beadboard is at 4'. Here is a photo of my master bath. Where you place your mirror doesn't have anything to do with ceiling height. Height of mirror might, but not it's placement. You want the mirror where it is comfortable for members of your familiy, i.e., short or tall, children, etc.

Thanks for the feedback and ideas. The varnish idea is intriguing; I think I've seen similar applications and they end up looking very shiny and not a match for the paint. This is not so terrible, but would be a bit of a different look. Are there any varnish-type products which would have a more neutral finish? Also do you think I'd need to varnish the ceiling as well to protect from condensation, or only on the walls which would be receiving direct 'splashes'? We are leaning towards keeping the tub, and retrofitting it with a shower. The idea of a hand-held European-style shower is very appealing; we're wondering if maybe a ceiling-mounted curtain ring would be sufficient to prevent splashes if the shower hardware were somehow mounted inside the curtain, maybe from a bar mounted to the ceiling? We did something similar to a clawfoot tub in our previous house - link added to show what that may look like. It would be a tricky install since the curtain ring would probably need to be mounted at the same angle as the slope of the ceiling. We would probably just leave the current tub faucet set in place and add another faucet set that operates just the shower. There's not really an economical way to create space for a separate shower, changing the footprint of the room is off-the-table for us at this point. Here is a link that might be useful: clawfoot shower system

BM now sells it's original oil-based alykd (in a petroleum oil base), a water-clean-up alkyd (in a mineral oil base), and latex paint. They tell me that the water-clean-up alkyd is almost as good as the oil-based alkyd but I'm skeptical, so I went with the original oil base when I painted the inside of my exterior doors recently. The original oil base is supposedly going to be phased out (it already has been modified so much to eliminate VOCs that it isn't nearly as strong as the oil paints were "back in the day"). The water-based alkyds will remain available. This info is all per the owner of my local BM store and current as of 2 weeks ago when I bought my paint. As far as painting latex over oil goes, you CAN do it, but you need to prep well and use a bonding primer. I've been doing it (my whole house was oil based on the trim) for a couple years now by washing the oil paint on the trim to remove the dirt/grime, painting one coat of a bonding primer like Zinsser 123, and then painting 2 coats of latex topcoat. It's been fine. If you put latex directly on top of oil with no primer, it won't stick. The PO's did that in a couple of the bedrooms here, and I was able to literally PULL most of their paint off with my hands (I had to use a scraper in a couple spots, but for the most part, it came off in big sheets!) to get back down to the oil paint, which I then primed and recoated with latex. Yeah, that wasn't fun. So if you're gonna put latex over oil (or even the waterbased alkyds over oil), I'd definitely spend the time doing a coat of bonding primer -- better safe than sorry.

I just don't know that vinyl is really necessary, my opinion. We did our basement bath in fairly inexpensive composite beadboard (not solid hardwood, but not pressed paneling) and primed and painted it with good quality exterior paint and have had no problems. And we have kind of a weak exhaust fan setup so we have had some moisture nearby. It's looked great for 10 years now. Also, just to your point about whites, my upstairs bath is all white (historical style 'sanitary' look) and it is like 50 shades of white in there :) When I picked paint color, I tried to focus on the lighting and looked at swatches in the same light conditions when I would be in the bathroom most often.