A stainless steel one. Like Kohler or another well known American brand. Fireclay ones ae just problematic for the trades to deal with as they are hand made and variable and shipping them can be a risk. So can even having the plumber install them. All it takes is a heavy hand and you've cracked it. BTW, you should be searching on the Kitchen forum for kitchen specific answers. There is a lot more info available there and it's targeted to answer more kitchen-centric questions.

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!

We just bought a sink and if I was going farmhouse it was going to be Blanco, hands down. We beat up our old Blanco and that thing just never failed to impress us. Their farmhouse also has a workstation option which I think is really ideal if you cook a lot or want some additional organization. But I'm telling you the last sink just wouldn't die... It didn't pop with hot liquids, it didn't scratch where I couldn't clean it EASILY, never saw awful distinctive spots, left cans in it with no problems, etc. All the horror stories I read while researching sinks I never had an issue with. Give Blanco a try if you like the look of their farmhouse!

Thanks. I just checked and I do in fact have a "small radius" stainless steel Kraus sink. But still, I must use my hand to sweep food toward the drain. Every. Single. Time!!! It's so annoying. I think the issue is that the base of the sink is notably flat. I think I need a sink with a more profound slope/pitch so that things drain correctly. Sabrina, I looked up that sink and it has a very strong slope and nice rounded corners. Being 35" wide there would be no issues with things not fitting - perfectly large. Looks nice. Since I'm more concerned with chipping and cracking and less concerned with scratches, it looks like stainless steel is a good fit for me. I googled "high quality stainless steel sink" and first things to come up are Ruvati, Havens, Kholer. I want to pay for quality, not just a brand name. Not sure how to differentiate quality from status symbol. Any pointers?