Wow, thanks bumble doodle! Tt is great to know that the tub works well as a shower. We are tall too--at least most of us (two of my teenage daughters are twins and one is 5'2" and the other is 5'10", so maybe the short one complains a bit but that's ok, since she complains about everything!) We are getting the non-jetted version. Also, I am hoping that building the deck at the front will help with the water spray. I am pushing the tub back into an alcove under the window the long way (so we get into the tub at the 32" side rather than from the 48" side) and we are trying to go without shower doors in order to make the bath feel open. With a deck, we buy a few more inches of length to help avoid water on the floor. We may not succeed and will put a panel on if we have to. Any thoughts on this?

Well, phooey. I taped it out in the bathroom with blue tape last night and it looked like it would fit, but with too many nos, I'm back to the drawing board. Interesting thought, Vix. Right now we don't actually have a toilet room, so much as a separate toilet "area" (there's no door, and the closet takes up too much room to add a door), but it's on my agenda to create one. In our house, it's very necessary. I generally use that bathroom to try to FIND privacy, only to have 3 people (and sometimes the dog) follow me into the bathroom. I'm looking forward to having a door that locks and a fan so that I don't have two little people handing me the TP and asking whether I'm doing number 1 or 2 (oh, and the 1 year old likes to flush while I'm ON the pot; so I've got my own special cold water washlet), while DH decides that he absolutely has to shave and brush his teeth at that exact moment. Now if I take a hike to the guest bath on the other side of the house, all three just follow me AGAIN. Sometimes when I have insisted on locking the door in the guest bath (no way to do that with our LOUVERED -- why??? -- pocket door in the master), my one year old plopped down prostrate outside the door and cried until I open the door. For my W/C, I want to put in a LOUD fan; no whisper quiet for me. Maybe I'll even add a radio. :) The way I'm seeing it, I can either get rid of the long vanity altogether and live with a fairly small vanity, plus a tub and shower, I can skip the tub and live with the kids' bathroom on the third level as the only room with a tub, or we can bump out that weird corner jog, which would give us an additional 49'' X 27'' space -- enough to fit a 5X3 tub, 5X3 shower and keep the two vanities. But that sounds very expensive and will require carefully removing and replacing the siding to match the existing. DH's response to all this was "why do we need a tub?"

Three months later...Research has shown me that a pony wall with tile on one side and glass on the top of the pony wall is not very stable since I will not have a tub against the pony wall to stabilize it. I know the pony wall can be bolted to the concrete and one side wall. Some have put a metal rod or pipe in the pony wall. I have read that sometimes the grout starts cracking on the pony wall...maybe due to wall movement or the wrong grout? I originally wanted a pony wall to make the bathroom lighter since it does not have a window. Now, I am thinking about having a full height wall because the pony wall has a view of the toilet. Now, I am worrying about having enough light.

You can install high and low niches depending on the wall. The low niche will probably get really wet though and need wiping out after every shower. You could do one long high niche or maybe a ledge instead that spans the whole width of the shower, depending on if you have the width to do that. At my house, we put a niche opposite the shower head in 2 tub/shower combos. One of them wraps the corner and continues on the long wall a bit. They tend to not get very wet at all. At our vacation house, we just have the ordinary low soap dish in the tile wall for patents kneeling down to bath children. For additional products for an adult bather, we put a little stool next to the tub. Check with your tile pro regarding the walls and what your options are. We actually ditched 2 of the tubs in our recent vacation home remodel, but kept one for bathing kids. There’s a hot tub on the deck, and we found that almost no adults were using the inside tubs over the last 20 years, so we built showers-only in 2 of the bathrooms. In the showers we didn’t build niches. Instead we put a bench and people tend to put their products on one side of the bench. We also installed a corner basket/grab bar that can hold a few things.