Manhattan42 - sometimes you say the craziest things. In my neck of the woods, every crawlspace is vented and unconditioned. Sealing crawlspace is a new thing but even then you don't purposely heat the space. There is R-19 under the floor - that does a pretty good job at keeping the heat in the house. Are you in NY? - if so it is possible that your codes are more like the OPs. But around here in crawlspace land - we vent and don't condition. Sealing costs some $ but does help some wuth heating costs. To the OP - you probably have a basement - so all this doesn't apply. Yes - you could heat the basement. This helps but tile is still cold and it is nice for the bathroom to be the warmest room in the house when you shower. We use supplemental heat on our 2nd floor bathroom. It really sounds like heat lamps or fan heaters are what you want. They both cost the same to put out the same heat. You can only beat that if you have a hot water heating system and can tap into that. Having had both - I prefer the fan because of the "baked" feeling of heat lamps. The lamps can be directed better for heat in one particular spot but the fan heats the room better. My father is a PhD engineer who wrote some pretty landmark papers on energy efficiency in the 70s - he agrees that using electric resistance heating in a bathroom for occassional heat is the way to go. If you use it for 5% of the time, it doesn't really matter that it isn't the cheapest way to make heat.

I Crema de marfil (sp) 12x12 tiles in my master bath. Love the looks of the floor when it was new and still do in some places. IMHO, with vanity chair, kids, dogs, cats, Make up, after shave, etc, it just did not hold up well at all in the heavy traffic areas. My daughter spilled nail polish remover and it ruined an area of the tile. The least expensive quote to repolish 80sf was $650. I'll retile with something more duable for that price than spend it on repolishing every so many years. It may work for some. It did not work for us. But it is pretty. Here are pics when it looked good

circuspeanut, That makes total sense. And I totally agree that it's a better layout. But---- we're really having renovation burnout now. As you know we started demoing the main living area a year ago.. and we're still installing trim and living with doorless cabinets and plywood counters in the pantry. And that's spending every second of spare time on it! So, I'm trying to find a good compromise between making this cruddy bathroom work and look better, and not making huge amounts of extra work for DH. He's the plumber and electrician. He's already groaning about moving the door.... but I do think that will be a pretty dramatic improvement over the floor plan we have now. We've decided to do a new tub/shower combo, and he was relieved that that meant he didn't need to break into the 1950's drains to move the toilet. :)

I had the exact same problem. I picked out the vanity I wanted but did not think about the fact that it wasn't made to sit flush against the wall. I spent a month looking for something else, but in the end we decided to go with something shorter and have it not be against the wall. But we were going from 72" to 60" which is probably not workable in your mom's situation. I did find a lot of vanities that did have flat sides and could work in a corner, if you are willing to have the countertop fabricated. They just need to not have any trim detail on the top or bottom like the one you picked out does. I would just look at the ones without the pre-made tops. Because the pre-made top will still leave you with a slight gap because of the countertop overhang. This is an example: Avanity Modero which is sold everywhere, not just at Lowe's. The cabinet we ended up buying is an Avanity Madison which won't work for you, but I assume it is of similar quality. We are pretty happy with it. The drawers and doors have soft close but I do feel like the glides in my Ikea kitchen drawers are better quality. It is very pretty and I wanted a stained wood so I am really happy with our choice. If I had been willing to go with a painted finish, I think we might have stuck with the 72" Modero.