To use large tiles in a shower the pan, take a look at the floor of your shower. The easiest way to do it is to draw a line from each wall-wall corner straight to the drain. If your shower floor is a typical square, then the floor will be divided into four triangular sections. Now add the slope from the wall to the drain, and your floor will look like a shallow inverted pyramid. To use large format tiles, each triangular quadrant of the preslope will have to be dead-flat. The floor will have grout lines at the four drain-to-corner section lines. How the remainder of the floor tile gets cut up depends on how you want it to look. Large format tile on a shower floor can look quite stunning if the layout is properly done. Otherwise it can look awkward, uneven, and unbalanced. With a symmetrical shower you just need to break out a pencil and paper and sketch out a few ideas.

Lovely! I like the classic white tile and porcelain and how you used furniture pieces in the bathroom. I love that the storage at the end of the tub has pull-outs that can be reached from the toilet. Your custom sink and backsplash and counter are unique and beautiful. Yours may be the first bathroom sink I have seen in which a small or medium dog could be washed! That is a good thing! I showed your pictures to my DH because I am thinking of classic tiled walls with a chair rail for when we redo our bath in a couple of years. He liked it! I was expecting him to say, "too old fashioned." He did not, he said it looked nice. From him, nice is a compliment. He even liked your rows of listello. I was just at the Tile Shop's site the other day looking at the Hampton tiles because someone was selling some on Craigslist. I am hoping to do as you did and get what I can cheaper there, and fill in the rest from the store. I can see that you worked very hard to secure all of your materials - and then cut the floor tiles to size and culled the Hampton tiles, too! You succeeded very well in getting the look you wanted while saving money along the way. Congratulations, and thank you for the pictures and great detail and supply list.

You can check flatness by taking a pair of tiles and placing them face to face or back to back. If there is any gapping around the edges or in the center when you look at them from the side, then they are not perfectly flat. That doesn't mean that they can't be used. It just means that they will look better if they are not laid in an overlapping pattern where you get lippage, and it is important, if they are bowed, that it is consistent from tile to tile. I did a small bathroom in 18" square tiles that were perfectly flat and I still chose to align the tiles in a standard, straight set pattern. Lippage

When I suggested running it the long way I was considering the best look for the bathroom beyond too. I like a long edge to run into the room. It will make less cuts by the tub too so the edge is tidier. I don't know how wide the hallway is but to me the layout looks very chopped up since there's only one full tile in each course. With the 1/3 offset that an amateur should probably use it will be even choppier. It will be one large format tile next to a sliver of the other. The pic Bill posted is beautiful, but it looks like the hall pattern follows the pattern that was chosen for a larger space. That's why I like the stacked pattern here, running the length of the hall and then continuing into the bathroom.