If you don't want to deal with much now, just don't close in the underside of the new floor. You're probably stuck with running the joists a particular way already, but if not consider which way would make running venting easier. You can run wires any way you want, but not an 8" vent unless you want to either have a very deep cavity, or soffit in the vent. Also, are you going to worry about noise between the bedroom and kitchen? We insulated all the walls/ceiling around our master bedroom to cut down on noise. Here again, any of that will be done from the kitchen side (ceiling) so can be done when you do the kitchen. You can always nail heavy poly up on the kitchen side to help control any dust that might come through until you are ready to do the kitchen. I'd also be interested in seeing how they are dealing with the support issues. My house is balloon framed, meaning the wall sections go from sill to roof, and the floor joists are attached to the wall with hangers, they don't sit on top of it for support. When we redid that section, we put studs below the joists for added support, but they had been that way for about 75 years with no problem. This room is about 16' across. We also increased the wall depth to 6" to add insulation, so you don't see the 4" stud that is alongside the new one that is underneath the joist. Here is another picture showing how they are attached. This part of the house was added on, so you can see the orignial exterior wall of the first part -including the roof overhang . . .

I have both a Shaw fireclay (in my butler's pantry) and a Silgranit (in the kitchen). I love them both. The fireclay does get those stainless steel scratches on it from pans. It comes off with a bit of scrubbing and some cleaner. The Silgranit doesn't show anything. I have a charcoal color. I have to remember to clean it, because after I am done doing anything in it, I just spray it down. Every once in awhile, I clean it with some dish soap (I do any hand washing of dishes in the Shaw), just to make it feel clean and refreshed. You can see photos of my kitchen on my blog. Just scroll down a few days or search for kitchen. Here is a link that might be useful: My blog

Ever considered those commercial hair nets? I'm happy to see prevention is happening at home in this thread. I get so sick of people whose kids get hurt, then they want the manufacturers to change their designs, layouts, etc. Instead of looking at their own, well, I'm going to say "lack of forethought" for things they themselves take for granted but must teach a child. SO much of common sense begins at home. It doesn't necessarily come out of the blue. Cooking is a great place to start. Plus, it's a life skill. No one has mentioned what happens if and when someone gets hurt!?! Burns: ICE on them. Not butter, not oil, not cucumber, not tomato, not a bandage. ICE. So the burn doesn't continue to burn down into other layers of skin. Teach them basic first aid, too! Ask them how to incorporate their safety lessons from school into the kitchen. The firemen come to the schools, what would they tell them here in their own home? Much of what is not taught is what to do next. After the injury. After the call to 911 (which can be dialed from the phone in the kitchen, right?). After they run into the house, school or knock on a stranger's door when someone accosts them. (TELL SOMEONE!) So incorporate that into your lessons. It's not just cooking that these things can affect. (or is it effect?) Hair nets. There you go.

I think we're in the minority of people who aren't big corner susan fans, which is one reason we didn't use one---I actually liked (!!) our old blind corner cabinet a lot, though our vintage cabinets were shallower than modern ones, so I was cognizant of that in planning the new one. The main reasons we didn't do a corner susan, though, were that I would have had to give up the pot drawers (with a susan, we'd have had 6" pullout/12" for susan on one side, or more likely some sort of inventive setup for tray storage, and then 12" for susan, 18" drawers on the other, which wasn't worth it) and my husband really didn't like any of the susan doors we saw (the kind that fold out, the kind that spin around, etc.) Had we gone that route, though, the super susans seemed like a nice solution. For our blind corner, we're getting a Hafele Magic Corner with a drawer above it---first choice was the Magic Corner II, which sits behind a standard door, but that didn't fit, so we went with Magic Corner I, which is door-mounted. Not in yet so can't say how we'll like it, but DH fell in love with one we saw in a showroom somewhere. (He likes gadgets.) We only have lower cabinets, so they're not lighted. (Had we done uppers there, though, we would not have wrapped the corner---would just have had them on the range wall.) Plan is to store appliances like the rice cooker and blender (and perhaps infrequently used cookware that gets bumped from the pot drawers) in there. My very favorite corner solution, though, is to do standard cabinets and then open the blind space to the room behind it---we couldn't do this because our dining room has columns with built-in cabinets in the corners (hard to describe, but basically 14" of the 24" space was inaccessible, and 10" wide drawers seemed silly). But if you can do it, you get useful storage on all sides. I wouldn't flip the range and fridge, because you will need to walk across a doorway with pots and water in that case, which I wouldn't want to do.