Remodeling the Master Bath

When we purchased this house it came with it's own set of "quirks".  I like to think of them as character traits most of the time, but a few of them do require a fix and if you have been reading along you know we have "fixed" many of those things.  However, the next project is BIG.  It is the master bathroom and closet.

You see the previous owners of our home must have believed in a type of redundancy that I am unfamiliar with in life.  We have TWO master bathroom and a rather small closet space, so we are converting one of the master bathrooms into a large walk-in closet and completely renovating the remaining bathroom to bring it into the 21st Century.  

We already have the bid from the contractor, but when all the subcontractors started arriving and discussing the project it became obvious that the budget was being "redefined".  A part of refinement came when the general contractor opened up the floor near the in-ground Japanese soaking tub (yep, you read that right ... it seats 6) right in the middle of the space to discover the crawl space is only about 10" and not sufficient for the plumber to do all of his work.

All I heard was blah ... blah ... blah ... $$$ ...  Now we have a hole in the floor and are awaiting new bids to see how much more money we need to save before we get started.