Muscat I wouldn't remove the only tub. I personally prefer a shower but only if you have at least one tub in the place, and your option wouldn't allow that. I'm doing two places...in our main home, everything is tiled, ceiling, floors, etc. in granite or a high end porceline. The costs to do that are pretty high. But, in the second place, which still needs to be nice, I am doing the same type of thing, but drastically reducing the costs by using less exensive porceline, and not going with the fancy stuff (ie in the family room bathroom I won't tile the ceiling, and the tub will be a decent quality air jet tub verses a water and air jet tub). In the master bathroom, there is literally room for a small tub and a toilet alone (the vanities are in the bedroom with a partial wall to a 15" ceiling). I don't want to spend the money to make it really lovely...but it needs to be really lovely LOL so I'm going to take out the existing tub/shower combo and go with a shower alone. In that space, because it's so skimpy, I'm going to have to go with a tiled and framed in space so it has the appearance of being pricy...but just pick tile well :) I also will do a stock door verses frameless glass (which is a freaking fortune) so that will give me a huge savings. Then in the downstairs shower, I'm going to use one of the preformed pieces. But honestly, if this weren't the third shower in the house...I'd not do this. I'm only going to feel comfy getting away with it because it's the shower for the sauna, so keeping it simple will be ok I think. But one big savings...is to use preformed shower pans and then tile the walls only. Having the pan made on site is a pain in the arse and it's expensive (it has been for me so far...but then we're on our third tile guy so perhaps that's part of it LOL) Anyhoo, in the master here I'll use one of those preformed pans, which look nice, but not quite as custom as tile would. I bring this up, because I've seen your backsplash :) I don't see why, with careful planning, you couldn't do the same thing...apply tile to the wall and use a preformed pan or tub that the tile butts up to (I know there's more to it than that...but it's not as hard as getting proper slope in a shower floor!) I don't know how hard the ceiling is...I'll leave that to someone else to chime in on, but I think you could do the walls pretty darned nicely, given the example of your existing work. Just stay away from the really hard stuff...natural stone, huge tiles (mine are 24x24 so that's why I bring that up) and don't try to build in any fancy nieches. And post when you're done :oP You know you can do it!

It was used in place of where you would see drywall tape in today's sheetrock world. It will run the length of the wall to ceiling joint. It's typically embedded and generally nailed in place as well. It's easiest to just get a section loosed up by banging with a hammer. Once you get a good 6-12" section free, I generally grab a pair of plyers (or if you used gloves, your hands) and grab ahold of the free end and yank the rest down. Now, in your case, you are pulling everything down, so whatever is the simplest to pull it all down without banging around so much that you start causing sheetrock pops in the adjacent areas! Lids are always dusty and nasty, so if you aren't using a dust mask, would suggest grabbing one before pulling it down.

I got the cabinets through Home Depot (20% off) they are not higher end but they have held up extremely well and we’ve been happy with them. I don’t remember the brand, but the color is cognac on maple. They’re standard kitchen cabinets. We got 2 regular drawer banks, 1 extra wide drawer bank, 2 sink cabinets and the closet you can see in the picture for about 1800 w/the discount. We bumped the shower wall 6 inches into the bedroom to make the shower bigger, pulled the cabinets out from the wall a couple of inches to provide more counter top. And curved the edge the counter for interest. Just for fun, this is what we had to start with. The tub was rusted and there were two doors, 1 from the hall & 1 from the master bedroom, we closed up the hall door. I think we got our moneys worth. LOL As for the labor, I found my Contractor through a plumber I had hired to put in a kitchen faucet. I asked if he had someone good he could refer and he referred Matt to me. Matt had his own company but just him and his guys. All of his work was by word of mouth, he didn’t advertise or push for business, he didn’t need to. I think I got fair pricing from him because he didn’t have the overhead a lot of the larger companies might have. He wasn’t the least expensive and he wasn’t the most expensive. Finding someone who was willing to work on our schedule and not having to have it done ASAP is what really helped me to be able to keep our costs at a minium for both labor and materials.

The challenge is that once you get down to 12" deep (or even 15" deep) for a vanity, your sink options are extremely limited, so I don't know how much a custom cabinet would necessarily help on that front (apart from getting you something you like stylistically). Personally I'd rather have at least 18" deep to have a more functional sink and just live with the 30" clearance. For ours we stuck with a standard depth vanity because it's the only storage in the room apart from a medicine cabinet, and losing the 3" by dropping to an 18" vanity wasn't worth the extra clearance for me. if you post your layout you might get some other creative solutions, though.