I have a small house. Small baths. You don't like housecleaning nor wiping down after kids. One thing I did was I got rid of the ceramic tile tub surround and had white swanstone panels installed. I never want to clean mildewed grout again. I love tile and put it above the panels. Yes, I prefer, way prefer the look of tile but not at the cost of cleaning it. The swanstone looks pretty good. Sorry no pics. I have two Americast tubs and I think they are acrylic..I love them. Had cast iron before. They are shiny, sparkly, fresh and white. I think my cleaners use a spray to clean them. I am glad you are thinking this thru before you do extreme drastic measures. 1000s f is not going to be better with the addition of windows. Editing, building up, and up going storage will help, not windows. Natural light is overrated. Look at small space solutions and not at glam or cliched luxury sites. We built closets onto our bedroom walls instead of new dressers. Up to the ceiling. Think California closets. With drawers and cabinets. Not pretty but functional. We have ikea Brimnes headboards with under bed storage drawers in our new house. I am an ikea slave. Your family is always going to take a lot of time and energy and that's just the way it is. A 1000sf house will not be easy but it's home. And I love love your kitchen. Think about the life you live for now. Think first before acting.

Can you run the exhaust duct vertical up into the attic, then horizontally out the side gable wall? With a long run, you can install a remote inline fan in the attic itself. The bathroom will simply have the ventilation grate in the ceiling. Check out Fantech fans. Do not vent the fan directly into the attic space, even if the attic is open to free air. Bad, bad, bad. As far as the HVAC portion, it can depend. Plumbing is rigid and waste pipes have to be set to a specific pitch for drainage. I'm not a big fan of flex HVAC, but there are times when its use makes sense. So prioritize. 'Larger" and "more rigid" and things that need to be set at a proper pitch (waste pipes, for example) get to be set first. "Smaller" and "more flexible" get set last. Sometimes the depth or width of your joist bays will allow them to coexist in the same space. I think you know what has to be done and you're simply asking for confirmation. You're on the right path. Draw out your floor framing with joists and joist bay spaces. Superimpose the location of your plumbing fixtures over that. Then draw in your rigid waste lines which have to be pitched for drainage. Then your HVAC as needed if it's rigid duct. You have more flexibility with flexible duct (sorry). Plumbing supply is small diameter and can normally be routed around things. Copper is rigid, PEX can waffle here and there but needs more support. Soft electrical can go anywhere and gets what space is left over.

If you're not trying to be 'defiant' of our reasoning, you're certainly trying to convert us to your way of thinking, and I don't think it's going to happen. Clearly you are not open to this idea, but others may at least consider it. So far the inspectors have not said anything. I consulted with two of them, the city engineer, my contractor, and fan suppliers before doing it. Firstly, I'm not going to contradict a building code, especially when there's no discernible logic (ok you disagree but fail to impart what actual advantage your system offers) or advantage to it. I'm not going to run to the library immediately to check the code, but I do get there reasonably often and will check. Again, the inspectors who are familiar with the code are okay with my installation. It could be that a fan is not required simply because I have ventilation into the room via the AC ducting and/or a window, so whether I have a fan in the room is my call. You mentioned your area does have mould issues....(as do all areas I guess) - your system is particularly unwise due to that. You are creating an unnecessary hazard. There seems to be no mold issues in the southwestern deserts or the Rocky Mountains. Our weather is heavily influenced by the Gulf of Mexico so we have humidity in the summer. I don't think it is going to be a problem but is certainly is an issue. Definitely not a hazard. You may even have created a fire hazard You're being alarmist. Explain to me how my house catches fire because the bathroom doesn't vent to the outside. There are a couple advantages to my system. First the fan draws only dry air into it. This keeps the wet dust from collecting on the fan blades and reducing the fan efficiency to near zero in a few months. Second, the fan is mounted 24 inches above the floor in the bedroom. If I need to clean it, which I doubt I will anytime soon, its right there at knee level instead of overhead on the ladder. Third, the air at 24 inches is blown up to the ceiling in the adjacent bathroom 9 inches down from the 9-foot ceiling. As you pointed out, warm air rises. My system blows relatively cool and dry air in a the ceiling height to thoroughly mix the warm/moist air with cool/dry air to get a more uniform air temp and moisture throughout the room. Fourth, air sucked into a fan is only sucked extremely locally. Without a few classes in aero I can't really get into how that works, but you'll notice the exhaust of a jet engine, or even an electric fan for that matter, can be felt much farther away from the blades than the intake air induction can be felt. You have to hold your hand directly to the back of a fan to feel any air intake at all. My system, even with a diffuser at the opening into the bathroom, blows the air into the room hard enough that I can feel it against the far wall, thus ensuring thorough air stirring and mixing. Fifthly (?), in the winter humidity is not a problem here. In the summer it can be if your AC is not properly designed. Mine seems to be but this room has not endured an entire summer. Actually spring is slightly worse for humidity because the humidity is up but the temps are not warm enough to trigger the thermostat. In the summer the AC runs day and night as the outside temps sometimes don't come down into the 80s for several days at a time. It's rather like 'vacuuming' or should I say reverse vacuuming, a room by blowing it all out with compressed air. There may be something about that system you like, but you're just taking the dust from one room (read humidity and bathroom smells) and spreading it throughout the rest of the house. And your vacuum system sucks dust in from outdoors and blows it all over the house. Which is better - the dust you already have indoors or the new dust your vacuum system is sucking in? I knew which fan you were talking about, but I was way off on my house fan power specs. Apologies. I'm not sure what model of blower I was looking at but mine is 3/4 horsepower - more like under 500 watts versus the 750 watts used by my directed fans. If one of my little fans wears out, I have backup. If my furnace fan wears out, it's a service call and a $12,000 AC system (mine is ready to be updated). Your bizarre method and logic may make the condensation evaporate more rapidly (or so you may think) because you are encouraging it to evaporate I guess into a larger area, however, that capacity would diminish over time, since the overall humidity will increase to the point of what is it - equilibrium? Where the air will hold no more moisture, and condensation begins to reform. This is where the structural damage sets in, mould forms and it becomes an unhealthy environment. From a heat transfer point of view, you need to watch your terms better to make that make sense but I think I know what you were trying to say. Still, the last sentence is the important one. The humidity increase from a shower is unlikely to saturate the 18,000 cubic feet of air in the house. However, this is exactly what I'll be looking for in the summer. These bathrooms are at the far end of the house. The concern is getting that air moved out of the confines of the bedrooms and out to the AC air intake in the living/dining rooms. I don't think it will be a problem in the summer with the AC on all the time, but we'll see. I'm more afraid of freezing my butt off in the shower with all that dry air coming in on me. I may have mentioned that I do not get any condensation in my bathroom now and I do not get any even when the fan is off. The reason for that is not clear. I'm working on the theory of massive tile heat sink where the moisture is actually condensing on the cooler tile but there is so much tile that I'm not noticing it. But there is never any fog in the bathroom and no condensation on the mirrors. Ceiling fans may have their drawbacks and I don't love cleaning them either, but I think I'd prefer them to a bunch of fans sitting around on the floors Clearly I'm not going to change your mind on that either but I have convinced several friends to use floor fans, especially in the winter, to mix the hot air at the ceiling with the cold air on the floor. Suddenly my short friends can get warm and my tall friends don't have cold feet. If the thermostat is at 5 feet off the floor and you're 5 feet tall, you live in a world where all the heat is above your head no matter what you set your thermostat to. But if you're six feet tall or taller, your face is always hot and your feet are always cold. With the little fan on the floor pointed at the ceiling behind the sofa, the air mixes in the entire room and everyone is comfortable. Everyone I demonstrate this effect to is amazed. A ceiling fan can be reversed and pointed at the ceiling, but you get into the problem again of the air intake being at 8 feet off the ground blowing air up to the 9-foot level. You really have to have the fan honking to blow that air to the walls and down. Then people seem to complain about the wind in the room. My little fans simply punch a localized hole in the thermal layers and mix them up. I keep ignoring the indelicate subject of bathroom odor, because that does not seem to be a problem in my household. It must be all the lard in the tamales down here ;-) Actually my wife pumps the veggies and fruit into us - I'm not a dietitian. Sorry I'm getting so wordy. Maybe this will stop now that we realize we're not going to change each other's minds.

"...I don't know what is 8+9. ...." I see you used a liquid waterproofing from Laticrete now. Was the reinforcing mesh used? Was the concrete board all first taped with mesh and thin-set and allowed to dry prior to waterproofing? Was the waterproofing given seven days to cure prior to flood test? Did you flood test? "....Attaching some more pics to give an idea of original framing as well as waterproofing layers…....." I don't like any of the framing you show in that first picture. The walls appeared to be framed with "Hat Track" which we use for boarding ceilings here in Vancouver. You would expect to see 2"x4" wall studs metal with 2"x4" Metal Track top and bottom. Seeing these I fear your wall assembly was not rigid enough and the failed grout the result of the wall flexing when pushed on. At the very top you see the Metal Track. There is one up and one down. Both pinned to the concrete floor and ceiling with wedge pins. I raised the ceiling to make room for the rain head and am adding a boarder inside the shower to continue the old ceiling height. Even these studs are pretty light weight. I believe the proper stud by the book is the heavier gauge stud. The kind not stocked in Home Depots but rather the drywall metal speciality stores. Local inspectors let this fly but crack down hard on wood framing and no firestopping. The spray foam I used in stead of throwing away. I find it adds one more level of strength to a new dropped in stud. Once dry it gets screwed off from the back side. Why does it appear you used two layers of 1/4" backer board. Looks like first 1/4" Wonderboard then 1/4" Hardie? The poly behind the backer board would be I think designed to lap over a rubber liner or something like Noble Company's Chloral. Link URL: http://noblecompany.com/products/chloraloy/