Hmmmm. This is interesting. I reposted the photos to my photobucket account, but I personally cannot see the photos in this message--it still says "photos have been deleted or removed" where the photos would be. However, it sounds like others can now see the pictures, so I'm going to assume it is fine for everyone. Anyway, enjoy. Glenna, the dark marble hex tiles are Vinchianzo marble, a very dark charcoal grey, sort of like a faded black. I bought the two different color marble hex mesh sheets (all solid), and then picked out the hexagons where I wanted daisies, and substituted the opposite color. I just have 7 daisies (lucky number!) in the bathroom--6 dark and one light one in the shower. They are randomly located instead of in a specific pattern--sort of like petals accidentally dropped. I originally had a much more elaborate scheme planned, and I mocked it up on a tiny scale on paper first and loved it. But in actual size I realized it would have been garish, so I threw out all of my hard work, and am very happy about doing that! On slickness, I don't have any issues whatsoever. I also wouldn't really be worried about an elderly person on a visit or a crazy, wet, running toddler. But I suppose if I was specifically planning for someone who was extremely frail, there might be even safer choices. I believe the small tile size and resulting increased grout lines provides some extra traction vs. large tiles, though. Good luck.

boymom, don't know if you visit this forum any longer, but if you do.... our vanity will be similar to yours in stlye and i am currently debating whether to do a single long mirrow, or 2 separate framed(with cabinet molding ~ 24x 42) with a double sconce on the wall in between.(ours is also under a soffit which we'll put recessed lights into) do you find you like the lighting of the sconces off the mirror? does the reflection bother you at all???

Haha. Funny that this thread resurfaces today. I am STILL dealing with the grout issue, though I think I am at the tail end. I have not done anything about the door because I was waiting to see what happened with the grout. Basically, original tile guy kept pushing us off and pushing us off til he started ignoring us altogether. Took me some time to find a few other tile guys to come out and have a look. The two tile guys who came out had differing opinions on what to do - one guy said use it, it's fine (which I didn't think it was because gritty bits of grout were running down the wall after every shower!). The other guy recommended painting this sealer on that the grout company sent -- it had to be hand applied -- two coats! -- with a freaking artists' paintbrush (only on the grout lines, not on the tile at all!) so I didn't want to do it myself and he would have had to charge a lot for his time. I decided to test out the sealer to see if it would even help in a few different spots -- some of the threads on the internet from fellow suffferers of this problem said they had spent the time to carefully paint on the sealer and it didn't fix the problem! So the testing took a while cause I kept getting sidetracked (plus I was dreading what I was going to find at the end of the testing so I was kind of procrastinating -- a lot.) But when I finally buckled down and focused on it, I discovered that while the sealer didn't seem to fix the problem, the areas that I had scrubbed really hard (while trying to see where the grout was "loose") weren't running down the wall anymore -- I guess I had gotten off the loose stuff that didn't cure right. So I tested a small area last week by scrubbing the crap out of the grout lines with a stiff grout brush and letting it dry. I rechecked it today - all good! So just this morning I embarked on the process of super-scrubbing every grout line to get off the loose surface stuff -- so far underneath everything seems ok though I'm expecting that I might find a few spots that need touching up as I go -- which will involve getting a tile guy back again - ugh. It's slow going -- all that hard scrubbing is kind of tiring so I can only do so much at a time - I did maybe a quarter of the shower this morning and now my arm is killing me, LOL! But it's better than tediously painting two coats of sealer with a tiny paintbrush!!! Anyhow, thanks for the compliments! I have not hung any towel hooks either, though I did replace the stand with one that has towel bars on the side -- I thought that would work at least for my sink (the one on the end closest to the stand) but since the towel bar is behind me, I didn't end up using it. We've just been folding the towel up on the counter. I'm such a slacker LOL!

I don't know where these figures come on the amount allocated to furnishing a home. In my experience, if you are buying your first home, you are going to be strapped for cash - at least for the first year or so. Most people I know made do with donations; thrift store acquisitions, odds and ends accumulated along the way and disposable furniture from places like IKEA - or they made do without. If one is moving to a second or third home, surely one has acquired furniture along the way and doesn't immediately discard it. Again, in my experience, most people with middle class incomes make do with already existing furniture and augment as needed. While it's nice to get new stuff, most people I know bought furniture gradually.