We have the same sort of situation (except ours bricks are regular color and have weirdly offset brick shelf and little Virgin Mary niche! Totally impossible to hang art, etc. Yuck.) We've toyed around with several options, including painting the brick; veneering it with a hand-troweled painted plaster or modern concrete; knocking off the shelves and covering the brick with a chic cedar veneer, or just plain old drywall. After living with it for a year and a half, and nearly completing major renovations in the adjacent LR/DR and in the kitchen that this heart is in, we're leaning towards sheetrocking the wall, adding a mantle, and tiling the area inside the mantle. There are lots of how-tos on the web if you plan to do this, but essentially you secure strapping to the brick wall, up to wherever you want the hearth facing to be, and sheetrock as usual. Observe code clearances for the firebox-to-combustibles measurement. Add a mantle (salvaged, store-bought, or custom made) and either leave the brick within it, or tile the brick. Once you have a blank sheetrocked wall, you can even add built-ins if you want. Fastening securely into brick is a PITA (our house is brick, I know!) but do-able. Get a hammer drill and masonry bits and screws. It'll look just like a normal wall and fireplace. Just make sure you're not wrecking something of valuable character that gives you home personality! That's my big concern with ours. If the off-center shelf and recessed arched niche were not there, I would leave ours as-is and simply add a cool thick salvage wood mantle slab over the fireplace... but the wall is big, dark, and crying out for some art, which can't be placed because of the brick protrusions.

Sorry I didn't get to this sooner, djdoggone, and sorry this is long but I can go on forever about bathrooms. LOL If it's too much to digest at once, you could save it to your "clippings" (look on the right side of the screen) and read it in bits. Glad your library is getting you the Powell book. Even if you find absolutely nothing else useful, which I doubt, there's some great eye candy in it! :-) However, 8'x9' is not a small bathroom, it is quite generously sized! When you said "tiny bathroom" I was thinking more like the 5'x6' bath that's fairly typical of a small house! Do you have a floorplan? I was able to fit both a soaking tub (a clawfoot, yum) and a shower stall into the 8.5'x8.5' master bath in my previous house; in the same-sized upstairs bath (oh, do I miss having separate baths) had a shower/tub but a double vanity and good-sized linen closet in the same size room. Very rarely do you have to lay mosaic tiles individually - they pretty much always come in sheets for easy installation, thank goodness! Unless you cough up for custom made borders (yeowch) or use a simple strip border, they have to be put together by hand but you can set them up on mesh mosaic sheets beforehand, which are then just laid onto the thinset. I had eliminated the small mosaics because you had specified "easy to clean" and that's a lot of grout! (I was unimpressed with the so-called stain-resistant epoxy grout. It DID stain, had a bit of a plasticky look, cost a lot extra for both materials and installation, and just wasn't worth the hassle in the end.) While Greek key borders can be had premade they are virtually always either glass or stone which isn't really appropriate for the style of house you're aiming for. One of the other nice things about the Daltile octagon-and-dot, it's dirt cheap. :-) You can do a simple but attractive border by cutting out the small tiles in, say, a double line around the perimeter of the room (before installing the sheet) and replacing them with those of another color. It is very classic and goes pretty much anywhere. (Some people will insist that you have to use large floor tiles with a small bathroom "to make it look larger". I disagree, especially if the color values of the small tiles and the grout are similar which minimizes visual clutter and busy-ness. I also disagree that small spaces must be automatically made to "look larger" - we have in this culture an attitude of "bigger is better" even when perhaps we should really embrace compact efficiency.) If you live in a chilly location, electric floor warming mats are probably the best few hundred bucks you'll spend in a bathroom project. On average they use about the same amount of electricity as a light bulb, and you can get a programmable thermostat as an option. I loved mine and the people who bought the house were totally jazzed about having such a "luxury". (It cost about $300 for the mat and the fancy thermostat - Home Depot and Lowes both carry the Suntouch brand, which is what I used.) Per the pedestal sink... maybe I'm just strange (okay, that's nothing new) but having pedestal sinks has always made it much easier for me to manage the clutter factor in the bathroom, because it forces me to put things away when I am done with them. When I have plenty of horizontal space like a full countertop, it accumulates "stuff". Some pedestal sinks have wider decks than others, too, giving you more room to set things down while they are in use - American Standard's Retrospect and Standard are two right off the top of my head, as are many of the wider pedestal sinks from Kohler (Bancroft, Kathryn, Devonshire, for example; the narrower versions have skinny decks). Toothbrush holders and suchlike can be wall mounted to get them off the sink top, or a glass shelf placed above the sink under the mirror or nearby. If there is floor space, a small standing cabinet (here's a spendy one at Pottery Barn, but it gets the idea across) can be placed next to the sink. As for toilet paper storage, there are attractive cylindrical storage containers especially for TP (Wal-Mart, Target, Linens & Things, etc.) that hold a four-pack and can tuck behind the toilet, keeping the "stash" within easy arm's reach. If you get monster packages, the remains can be stored elsewhere and the in-bath container kept filled from that. You obviously already know about recessed cabinetry, which is usually your best friend in a small bathroom - a wood-framed recessed medicine cabinet (VanDykes.com has a nice kit that is cheaper than a similar readymade from somewhere like Restoration Hardware) over the sink is stylistically compatible with beadboard etc. and holds some stuff, and if you use beadboard on the walls you can use a beadboard door on your recessed wall cabinet to help it blend in, and keep your trim very narrow. I had a tall, skinny (I'm talking like a 10x15" footprint) freestanding linen cabinet tucked into the corner near the toilet to keep the standard bathroom things in; things that were not used often were stored in the closet of an adjoining room. A pretty decorative cabinet can hang over the toilet to hold yet more - in the upstairs bath in the previous house that's where TP and such lived because we could just reach over our heads to get a fresh roll! LOL I am not much for the "spacesaver" sort of over-the-toilet cabinet, although some people like them. If you think the right way you can cram a positively ridiculous amount of storage into even a small bathroom. Can you do a pocket door? They are some of the best spacesavers in the world, and they have come a LONG way from the flimsy things of the 60s and 70s, more like the heavy and durable ones of the Victorian era (many of which are still functioning just fine today!). There is even locking hardware available. I understand the PITA factor of the combo shower and tub in a vintagey bath, I'm in the same boat. (Complicated by the need for a deep soakable tub for the 60" niche - I'm a daily soaker - in a lighter-weight acrylic tub in this 107yo house, feh! I love the feel of cast iron, but reinforcing the floor joists to permit the cast iron would require tearing up the floor in the hallway and one bedroom, or tearing down the ceilings in the dining room and kitchen. Uh, no.) Pretty shower/tub faucet sets are available - I love the one in American Standard's Standard Collection and it's very reasonably priced. Subway tile (white with light gray grout) would look especially lovely for the tub surround but if the hubby is being super stubborn then a solid surface (Corian type, but there are several other brands now) material would be attractive behind that glass and easily cleanable. A light gray with a subtle granite-like flecking, perhaps, although Corian does make a pretty solid light gray (Pearl Gray). Not quite sure what you mean by "how do I frame this bath" - can you clarify further? Have you visited the Smaller Homes forum? It's going through a slowish patch now but it has flurries of activity, and if you post questions you'll almost certainly get plenty of answers.

Okay, I have to say, you guys are AWESOME! @remodelfla - looks like that eBay seller is the same as the Amazon seller -Oracle, and the same price. Will have to check on whether shipping makes the difference. Just got notice that the sample has shipped so hope to get it this week. Trikeenan is out and Sea Turtles are in - love the glass but had to decide quickly and the turtles spoke to me (the Honu is sort of our family emblem). @fouramblues - that is the post I was looking for, and you got the name of the tile, too - Yay! (somehow "Bell" turned into "Beth" in my mind overnight - no wonder I couldn't find it). I think my flooring is American Olean so that was interesting....will research that tile when I get back on the desktop - search limited on iPad here. And I'm not sure what makes it "rustic" - mostly interested in low color variation (the "camel" looks like far too much) and the tile sizing/pattern - random, and more honed, smooth. But not polished/glossy. And not pitted. Interesting, but not to overpower the turtles. And I should mention, the backsplash on the other side of the kitchen is just under 3" tall and abut 20' long, so we don't want to cut a zillion tiles to fit, so multi-width will certainly make that easier. I was just at Home Depot buying dripper irrigation supplies and saw an interesting one called Bamboo something that I had seen online a few places in my search - it's all 1/4" strips and $15sf, but I get a military discount there and it's in stock. Thank you for all the help! Open to more ideas!

Thanks Christopher_H - i just posted on home decorating forum.