Well, phooey. I taped it out in the bathroom with blue tape last night and it looked like it would fit, but with too many nos, I'm back to the drawing board. Interesting thought, Vix. Right now we don't actually have a toilet room, so much as a separate toilet "area" (there's no door, and the closet takes up too much room to add a door), but it's on my agenda to create one. In our house, it's very necessary. I generally use that bathroom to try to FIND privacy, only to have 3 people (and sometimes the dog) follow me into the bathroom. I'm looking forward to having a door that locks and a fan so that I don't have two little people handing me the TP and asking whether I'm doing number 1 or 2 (oh, and the 1 year old likes to flush while I'm ON the pot; so I've got my own special cold water washlet), while DH decides that he absolutely has to shave and brush his teeth at that exact moment. Now if I take a hike to the guest bath on the other side of the house, all three just follow me AGAIN. Sometimes when I have insisted on locking the door in the guest bath (no way to do that with our LOUVERED -- why??? -- pocket door in the master), my one year old plopped down prostrate outside the door and cried until I open the door. For my W/C, I want to put in a LOUD fan; no whisper quiet for me. Maybe I'll even add a radio. :) The way I'm seeing it, I can either get rid of the long vanity altogether and live with a fairly small vanity, plus a tub and shower, I can skip the tub and live with the kids' bathroom on the third level as the only room with a tub, or we can bump out that weird corner jog, which would give us an additional 49'' X 27'' space -- enough to fit a 5X3 tub, 5X3 shower and keep the two vanities. But that sounds very expensive and will require carefully removing and replacing the siding to match the existing. DH's response to all this was "why do we need a tub?"

jake, you hit the nail on the head. the pipes are colling off under the slab, the water flow thru the shower head is not enough to overcome this. due to the layout of the house, the pipes run a minimum of 120 ft under the concrete, and that is if they take the most direct route from heater to tub. if they go to the other bath first, and i know they do since it has almost instant hot water, it is probably closer to 150 ft of travel in 3/4" copper lines. i know the lines are not insulated under the slab, that is not required here even though should be. but then again with no building codes, nothing is required! i did not get around to replacing the shower head this weekend, but i did run an experiment. i turned on the shower as usual, and sure enough after 2 minutes of being hot, the water went luke warm at best. i then turned the diverter slightly so that maybe a half gallon a minute flow was going into the tub. within second the water was HOT! my wife said that was the first shower this winter that she got to shave her legs in hot water. time for a new shower head, hopefully one that will provide enough flow to stop teh water cooling in the pipes.

That was my first thought too. The elbow where I sometimes see a drip goes to the tub filler. I tried running water, with the diverter set to 'tub', and no water comes out of the elbow. So I'm pretty sure it's not the piping between the diverter valve and the tub filler. That means it has to be coming from further above. Can a diverter valve leak *intermittently* and regardless of position? And why would it leak with the water turned *off* anyway? I tried running the water with the diverter set to 'shower' too, and again - no drip. But sometimes it will drip when the system has been off for hours. I even tried it with the diverter set midway between the two emitters - nope, still dry. I would think if it was bad packing on the diverter valve (my second guess) it would leak whenever water was flowing through it. Also, when it is leaking: - The hot and cold supply lines are dry, no obvious drips down them. - The line going up to the showerhead is dry, no obvious drip down it. Anything else to check? I'm baffled.

I’m not sure where your leak is coming from, I just wanted to tell our experience so you can gauge whether it might be a possibility in your case. One of our guest bathrooms had a leak that we originally assumed was from the shower. We hadn’t lived in the house for very long, and we hadn’t even used that shower yet when my sister came to visit. She stepped out of the shower and realized that water was squeezing up between the tiles when she stepped on them. Naturally, she informed us. My hubby had the entire bathroom completely gutted in half an hour! (It was a small bathroom with a Fiberglass shower, the tiles popped up like toast out of a toaster, and he’s just a beast... lol!) we see evidence of long term damage and provide my sister with another bathroom to use for the remainder of the visit. We didn’t start the bathroom remodel immediately, and when we did start it was slow going. We were very fortunate because we had barely started the remodel when we got another weather front move in with a whole lot of moisture... (It has been snowing a lot during her visit) and that’s when we realized the bathroom was leaking from another source! Hubby again ripped up the bathroom, and this time ripped out part of the wall that is on the exterior and that’s when we realized the leak was coming from outside. It took us a bit to figure out but we finally determined (with outside help) that it was because that wall was directly against an exterior chimney that had not been flashed properly. We left that bathroom unfinished for quite a while while we fixed the chimney problem, and waited for some more really good rain storms to make sure it was indeed dry before we finished our bathroom remodel. We were just fortunate that we have a lot of other bathrooms and this was just a guest bathroom. Anyways, I hope your issue isn’t something like that!