I have fiberglass and it becomes somewhat yellowed over time. My painters say that is due to the natural gas heat, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I will be replacing with tile when I get the funds for bathroom remodels. I’d encourage tile!
Tile with as few grout lines as possible (which means larger tiles). Tiles on the walls usually do not require much upkeep…
We have tile that is decades old in our showers and they still look pretty good with very low maintenance. I agree with minimizing grout lines and larger tile.
A long shopping day yesterday but I think we did a really good job bargain hunting for the bathroom. These are the items we selected for the bathroom. She brought her mother with her because her Mom gets a 10% military discount.
Bathtub - we got a deeper bathtub because that is what she wanted. Steel with porcelain overcoat for $185!!!
Bath Vanity - we found a really cute cottage style vanity with a solid surface top in a good material (not acrylic). It was on sale for the entire unit $225
Then we spent a long time looking at tile choices. In the end she wanted the classic white subway, even though I warned her it would be a little harder to clean. We are going to use epoxy grout to help minimize the cleaning issue.
We have not chosen the ‘bling’ inset tile yet but she was leaning towards a plain aqua/clear glass for inset.
The floor tile is 12x24 textured white with some minimal grey streaking (kind of like fake marble but without a lot of veining.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/MARAZZI-VitaElegante-Bianco-12-in-x-24-in-Porcelain-Floor-and-Wall-Tile-15-6-sq-ft-case-ULRS1224HD1PR/205473910
Really nice shower fixture set
http://www.homedepot.com/p/MOEN-Darcy-Single-Handle-5-Spray-Tub-and-Shower-Faucet-with-Valve-in-Spot-Resist-Brushed-Nickel-82550SRN/204836353
And matching 4 inch faucet
So, we have purchased everything we need for the hall bathroom except the toilet and some tile installation materials. All that is remaining is the labor for installation and about 6 sq ft of fancy tile
Total cost so far $838
I loaded some pictures
Wow! Not bad at all!!
ETA: I see the bath vanity is from Home Decorators. I recently bought from them a very nice piece for my entry hall – it’s a TV cabinet, actually, but I just wanted something low-ish for the space. I’m very impressed with the quality and the price. Quite reasonable.
May I throw out that new builds and remodals in my area no longer have stripes of different tiles. Subway tile with a pattern or gray grout sometimes but generally just plain tile.
Yes, I’m trying to get minimal contrasting tile
Would she consider something like a rope border white tile? Or is that considered, doG forbid, “dated” also? 
Cute vanity!
Rope tile is considered dated. Sorry
Uh oh. Time to gut a bathroom…
You know…people need to get what THEY want. If this couple wants rope tile…let them get rope tile!
If they want white applicances, fine. Stained molding…fine.
It’s their house! I know they don’t want these things…just saying!!
Plus, it doesn’t sound like they are thinking about selling anytime soon…and really trends will change. They always do!
Maybe it depends where you live, and what the housing stock is like. I think that on the west coast there seems to be more pressure to be up with the current trends, most of which are more suited to either comparatively “modern” architecture or urban semi-industrial spaces.
My job is to make sure I counsel them on staying away from anything that would make the house just a bit too personal and lower their resale value. I really cannot envision them staying in this house longer than 2 to 3 more years. That said, California buyers do expect a certain level of design to pay market price for a home. Otherwise, they will consider the home a ‘fixer’.
Unfortunately this home doesn’t lend itself to a contemporary style. It is just too much of a ‘ranch’. We’ll be lucky if we can even get the front of the house to have any curb appeal. Some prior owner just poured concrete everywhere and it’s just a sea of concrete for a front yard. The cost of removing the concrete is not in the budget.
Buyers in other places expect design from a pricier house too. They just may have a different definition of acceptable design. 
Back to the budget remodel
I loaded some photos of the petrified rats that fell out of the ceiling. For some reason my carpenter thought it was really important to save all the dead bodies to display for me. In case I wanted to investigate the species or something??? I quickly ran back out of the house and told him to get rid of them.
So far, the traps set haven’t caught anything under the house or in the attic so we think we are rat free and he has been busy shoring up every possible hole that they can get into. The main culprit was that, whoever built these horrid additions, just left spaces between the roof lines for critters to crawl right into the attic. And then, they left a wide open space on the side of the house under the little kitchen addition that they were crawling through.
As we pulled down the ceiling drywall in the big family addition, it became obvious that the contractor who built the addition (we know it was a contractor because the owners have a copy of the permit for the addition) did a really shoddy job. There are 2 x 8 long ceiling joists holding up the roof. Probably about 12 of them. Five of them were not even long enough to rest on the top plates on both sides of the room. They obviously cut these 5 wrong. They were too short. So what did they do? They just nailed a small piece of 2x4 to the end of the joist, with one nail and then rested the little extension on the back top plate. Over time, this caused the 2 x 8s to sag down and it created a sagg in the roof at the edge of the room. This sag was the culprit for a huge pool of standing water that eventually ate through the roof and was seriously leaking along the whole side of the house.
Then we pulled off the paper on the roof and discovered that they didn’t even use 2 layers of felt and/or torched the roof for waterproofing. So, the guys have torn off both the roofs in the additions and this past weekend my roofing guy worked both Saturday and Sunday tying in the roofs and getting a proper roof onto these additions… to the tune of $2,000.
While reroofing, we double checked all the plumbing and heating vents that need to go through the roof. Prior owner installed laundry hookups in the garage and NEVER EVEN vented the drain plumbing through the roof. So, the roofer had to pull off shingles on the main roof and install a vent for us.
One of the owner’s goals is to try to get laundry inside the house. So, we have designed a way that we are going to cut a doorway in the family room and enclose the laundry area of the garage so that the laundry becomes part of the house. This lets us use the existing plumbing and drains to save money. We’re going to have a cute barn door over the entryway to the laundry.
Meanwhile, the entire cast iron drain system clogged up on the owners the other night and we tried to get a drain service over the house but they all said they couldn’t come, too busy. So, my carpenter went to HOme Depot and rented a 100’ snake to clear the drains himself. So, once again I am the proud Project Manager of a big poop issue backing up into the house.
Today is hauling trash again. Probably two whole loads to get rid of the old roofing materials.
I loaded photos of the petrified rats, just in case anyone is curious
That will keep folks from looking at your page, LOL. I’ve seen live rats, dead rats, petrified rats, so that is not a deterrent.
Wow, that is a lot of extra work. The shoddy job contactor needs to be hit on the head with that 2 x 8!
One wonders where the building inspectors were. Don’t they inspect framing?
H and i found several mummified rats in the walls when renovating our first house, aka The Shack.
ETA: That rat looks like a dragon!
Consolation - yes, but only if one applied for a permit.
CB said they had a permit…that is how she knew they used a contractor.
Yes, there was a permit back in the 1970s. I researched it and the contractor went out of business in the early 80s. I just cannot figure out how a building inspector did not see that the ceiling joists were not long enough. We stand there every day and ask ourselves “How did this pass inspection??”. We discovered that the little kitchen addition, which was an enclosed back porch, was never even properly attached to the main house. There were gaps in the framing between the two buildings. These gaps are covered up by cheap T 1 11 siding that was nailed up around the outside. I think the siding was the only thing holding it together, although the roof had collapsed and was leaking badly. We just scratch our heads and have decided the inspector was ‘on the take’ or something.
I have loaded up photos of all the structural work we did last week. This is work above and beyond what should ever be required but every wall and ceiling we opened up revealed even worse stuff than we could ever guess. Who would ever guess the ceiling joists were too short?
At the end of each week I prepare a spreadsheet for the owners that shows all the expenses and labor costs and then I plot those against the original estimates so we know if we are running under budget or over budget in certain areas. This week I am going to have to have a hard talk with them about the fact that we have already used up the contingency and something is going to have to come off the list. The wife already realizes this at every turn we make and she just starts crying that her new kitchen or her new flooring is going to get cut.