It's a little late now, but if you'd centered the middle of a tile instead of a grout joint, you would've eliminated that skinny little piece on either side, and still stayed centered. That aside, it looks good so far! Ivette-- I'm getting an education right now with respect to balloon construction! The one thing that almost stopped us from buying the house was that back side of the house bows (I would guesstimate) about 6-8" from the middle to the two corners. When I first saw it, I thought the house was getting ready to collapse until someone explained that with balloon construction, that's SUPPOSED to happen! Boy didn't I feel stupid!! I'm learning, though!

I can believe the 100's (1000s?) of hours spent drawing and revising and redrawing. I worked on my house plans for 3 solid years before we were finally financially ready to build. The last year was just making tiny little tweaks like moving an electrical outlet over 8 inches so it wouldn't wind up covered by the table that I wanted to put right there. By the time I took my plan to an architect, he ended up just drawing the floor-plans exactly as I had them. Didn't even change a single door-swing. And, once the house was framed, except for all the construction crap lying around, I could have walked thru the house blindfolded because I'd walked thru it in my mind so many times. It was an amazing experience to watch it take shape and turn into the house I'd been picturing in my mind for so long. Now, after living in my new home for 16 months, I remain totally and completely ecstatic about the floor plan and about the way my home lives. It just "fits" us. I love coming home from work and still get a huge thrill when I catch that first glimpse MY HOUSE thru the trees as I round the corner. Your design shows the same careful thought about how the house as a whole and each room individually and each element within each room will work together to be a home for you and your family. It is going to be lovely and totally personal to you. Exactly what a custom home should be. If you've spent 100s (1000s?) of hours on your plans and haven't thrown up your hands in disgust, you obviously enjoy do this... and you are good at it! A word of warning tho, playing with floor-plans and designing living spaces can be totally habit forming. That's why, now that my house is actually built, I still haunt this forum and spend (waste?) uncounted hours suggesting tweaks for other people's floor-plans. I suspect you may already be a fellow addict. We'll know for sure if, once you have your final plans back from your architect and start building, you're back here on this forum making tweaks to other people's plans in between trying to ride herd on your builder and make sure he gets your home built right. LOL! Anyway, thank YOU for letting me get my fix for the day by tweaking on your house plans!

I vote tile floor, but with smaller tiles than 6x6. I've read too many nightmare stories of the pebble floor not draining well leaving standing water in your grout. I do have a question for you: If you don't want alot of grout, why are you looking at a pebble floor? Pebble floors have more grout than even a 2x2 tile floor. Compare the amount of grout (and the varied grout "lines") in tobler's pic above & the amount of grout in my shower using 2x2 tiles in the pic below. The reason for using smaller tiles in a shower floor is that the grout is what gives the traction under your feet to help prevent slipping and falling. The less grout you have, the greater your chances of slipping & falling--6x6 tiles leave very little grout and hence very little traction. You don't have to have huge grout lines either. They can be as small as 1/16". If you're worried about scrubbing, squeegee the walls and floor after every shower then spray an antibacterial cleaner (like Scrubbing Bubbles) once a week on the floor to kill any bacteria that may be there and rinse. That's all the maintenance you will need to do. Tobler has a beautiful shower and from their posts also squeegees to keep it looking like new. Note: The shower floor was not completely dry when this photo was taken so you may see some variation in the grout color. When dry, it is all a Pearl or cream color. When wet, it turns more of a light brown color.

It turns out the bead is a metal L-bead. So after some discussion, they decided to dig out the compound and add caulking instead. It's not a perfect solution, but it already looks better than the cracked compound. One of the reasons we didn't want Schluter on the right side is we don't have it on the left. Also, the bathroom is at the top of the stairs, so you would really see all that shiny chrome glaring at you each time you walk up the stairs. (Yes, there is already Schluter on the curb, and honestly, I hate it, but I can learn to look past it if it's the only visible one.) Regarding the glass enclosure, we may need to add a door later on if there's a lot of water spray. We're getting frameless glass, so in theory retrofitting a frameless door should be doable, right?