kayan: Being off balance won't hurt your tree. At worst you might need to put a support under parts that are weighted down by fruit. But if you are thinning the fruit properly and pruning to keep the tree short it will support the fruit without leaning. 6-8 ft is doable with regular summer pruning. That size won't hurt the trees health at all.

What is the transition going to look like from one ceiling height to the other? We have a transition from 10' kitchen ceiling to 8' breakfast nook ceiling. We cased out the opening and it helped make the transition look more defined. We have cabinets and counter in the breakfast nook space and while very similar to the kitchen cabinets, we painted them a different color but used the same hardware. This helped the spaces not look as if we were trying to make both spaces identical but they complement each other well. We also stacked upper cabinets. The upper cabinets are 36" high, then a 3" spacer where we hung a rolling ladder rail (to reach the highest stacks--if I had anything at all to do over, a minor thing, I would have increased this spacer, probably to 5-6"). The "upper-upper" cabinet stack is 18" high. We built up the molding with a 3" filler piece, egg and dart molding topped by crown molding (too fit other molding in our old house). We didn't go tight to the ceiling because we had issues with walls, floors, and ceilings out of square. That enabled us to cheat a bit to keep the dimensions looking square.

Hi In our market here in Australia we often use a ceiling transition of the size you mention to enable the kitchen style we want. We drop the ceiling over the kitchen most of the time to 9" and if the area is too big or we need to conceal something we create a coffer with different sections raised to 10" in an appropriate design. In this room we had to create a design to conceal the beam much like your scenario, drop the overall ceiling slightly to allow lights to be installed and create a bulkhead for the aircon ducting We designed a series of coffers so it looked like it was always meant to be this way. You can also see the aircon dropped bulkhead on the left, and the bulkhead in the top left corner running right conceals the beam Cheers

Anything can be done if you throw enough money at it. Adding tile to a home with wood joist subfloors from the 40's will take plenty of work. The Contractor will HAVE to do several technical assessments on your subfloor and the entire home. That means they have to find out the deflection rating for your space and then ADD layers of subfloor to get it to the right deflection rating (wood likes to move....tile HATES to move). This could add 1-2 inches of floor height onto what you have right now. Tile traditionally adds a little more than 1/2" to a subfloor. That's assuming the subfloor is "ready" for the tile. If they need to add another 1" of layering to get the subfloor RIGID (and flat enough....flat is BIG for tiles) enough to put down tile, then the heights of everything else can be disturbed. If that is required, all your doors have to be taken down, trimmed and rehung. Baseboards and trim all have to be dealt with. Counter top heights run into problems...Cabinets, etc all start coming into play. Anything that is close to floor level has to be dealt with. As you get into houses of this age, you HAVE to have old surfaces tested for both Asbestos and LEAD! If these guys have to disturb asbestos filled wall materials or lead based paint, then the REMEDIATION requirements start to tangle with the ENTIRE event. What was supposed to be a 10 day job turns into 2-4 months of nasty renovation nightmare. So....if cost is not a priority and you are well aware of EVERYTHING that needs to be done to get tile into this home (and I mean EVERYTHING) and you are prepared for a BIG Remediation expenditure and you are prepared for a LONG extension to the renovation, then you are ready and willing to have tile put down. Personally, if those floors can be refinished, I would go that route. If a new floor is a MUST, then I would look at properly installed glue down vinyl. It doesn't need as much work as tile.