You've got fireblight! Either the bacteria was in the scion wood but more likely it over-wintered in your golden delicious tree. The way you can find out is by cutting branches on the golden delicious - if the cut turns orange within 24-48h it's definitely fireblight. Golden Delicious is definitely prone to fireblight, see http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/Garden/02907.html. I'd cut the grafts off and try to control the infection in the tree, the ooze will spread the disease to your other trees via insects that feed on the ooze - perhaps the tree is already infected into the roots, in which case you need to replace it. I've grafted as late as May and June and never had any issue, so it's not the graft timing.

Let me say I enjoy your choice of a bold color palette. But my first reaction was negative towards the orange tile, so it comforts me to see you've stepped away from that. I like the countertop color and the glass tile, but the orange tile just doesn't do it for me. I understand what your builder is saying. Perhaps a way to relate the two would be to construct a somewhat traditional wood mirror frame with an inset middle strip of your red glass to jazz it up a bit. The mirror below isn't at all what I'm thinking style-wise, it just had the inner, middle, and outer bands that I wanted to describe. What I'll try to describe may not fit your design ideas...which is perfectly fine, It's your bathroom. But take this mirror below which again, I'm just using for reference because it has three "delineations" to the frame: Replace the inner black and silver decoration with your red glass tile. Replace the inner and outer "gold" detail with inner and outer runs of painted wood trim, painted the same color as the wainscotting. Have the outer wood trim wider than the inner wood trim, and have the outer trim relate in detail in some way to the other trim in the room...the wainscot, the toilet/sink detal, etc. The inner wood rim can be a little more basic, is should be minor to the more major run of outer trim. Hope that makes sense. But again, remember, it's just a mirror. No matter what mirror design you start with, you can easily change it.

dandy, I think you might be over-reacting :-) These things happen and not necessarily through any fault of the homeowner or gardener. Many of us inherit gardens that are plagued with invasive species - we just do our best to remove them or control them as best we can. And one of the primary characteristics of an invasive species is its ability to spread freely, often due to wind, weather or wildlife, none of which we can control, so it is not uncommon for an invasive to pop up in our garden or wooded property. But neither is a reason to give up gardening!! Just be diligent about not planting any thing that is considered to be invasive for your area and promptly remove those that do find their way in.

If you want darker grain, you need to leave the grain OPEN. The high grit level (320) is burnishing your grains CLOSED. So the grain is so tight you might as well be staining glass. It won't grab. I'm not really good with furniture grade finishes. That's not my background. A RED OAK is going to be red. As soon as you used 'amber' you applied ORANGE. Amber = orange = amber of any sort. I would bet this is a full 'start over'. But I will let others jump in with suggestions as to HOW to do that.