At long last, we're gutting the master bathroom in our home. It'll be nice to have an update also nice not to have a dark and leaky shower.

Still, we face some challenges. One of them is that I have very little design sense. I don't know what the options are, what looks good together, and sometimes even what I like. So, that makes remodeling hard. Remodeling seems to go better when people have confidence in their decision-making.

It also seems to go better when the HGTV vans come in and just fix everything in 48 hours or so for half of what I'm going to have to pay. I asked the woman at the plumbing fixture showroom why it seems so cheap when Chip and Joanna Gaines do it, and she said it's because they don't include labor costs--just, like, wholesale prices for the materials.

So, the lesson here is that HGTV is a big fat lie. Just FYI.

In any case, one component we needed to choose for our new bathroom was the tub. We selected one, a nice clawfoot job, but then it turned out that according to codes, we needed one with the drain on the right side, not in the center. If you want a clawfoot with a drain like that, it's got to be an oblong shape or a slipper style, neither of which we thought would look nice in the space.

Not that we know anything. But who needs a lifetime of doubt surrounding a seldom-used bathtub?

So the plumbing showroom gal gave us the option of a rectangular tub with some detailing in the toe kick area. This choice will also save us some cash because we won't need the fancy faucet that comes out of the floor and loops the edge of the clawfoot. When it came time to choose the faucet we will actually have, I deferred almost completely to the plumbing showroom professional. The faucet looked a-ok to me, and I just couldn't think about it anymore.