Not a tile fan. Beautiful (especially Bill V's work! Gorgeous!) but not for me. I might put down stone tile on a floor but never a countertop. Just don't care for the look atop a cabinet, whereas we have several floors with vinyl slate-look tile or sheet, LOL. Had laminate kitchen counters (which replaced old worn tile; but we ran out of $$$), eventually replaced in 2003 with Swanstone which is similar to Corian. It's a neutral beige granite-look - more like beach sand color, actually - and love it. Two big corner seams in our U-shaped kitchen are INVISIBLE. The installers spent over 1/2 hour sanding on each one. Every once in a while I'm rolling out pre-purchased dough. Love being able to sprinkle flour all over the countertop and then scrape 98% off with a stainless hand scraper! So easy. Heatproof to 375 degrees. Being used to laminate, I toss a double-thick potholder down if I'm putting anything down that's over that temp. I love and needed the quiet of solid surface. Our kitchen is right above our MBR suite and I'm often in the kitchen in the early a.m. when DH is still asleep.

Oh, does time fly ... My white Ikea kitchen was installed 5 years ago and I thought a follow-up would be usefull. I regularly see questions like: ¨Do Ikea cabinets hold up well over time?¨ and ¨Do you regret choosing white cabinets?¨. Well, the answers are quite simple: the cabinets look like the day they were installed and the drawer hardware is running as smooth as ever, even when filled to capacity. I have no pantry, so everything is in drawers, and you can stow amazing quantities of dry goods and cans. As for the colour (a white comparable to BM ´Simply White´), yes, you see everything on them, but in a positive way. Meaning that you clean them up sort of straight away and therefore ending up with a clean kitchen. I am still thrilled to bits with my hard working Ikea kitchen. HTH, Petra And totally not kitchen related, but beautiful, the garden in spring:

leavemeout: If you are dissatisfied with the color of your grout, you can either make it white again or change the color by using Grout Colorant. You can either recolor the grout white or even change to gray if you want. The colorant (I used Aquamix) is epoxy based and has a sealer in it and in my opinion it was very easy to apply. You put it on with a toothbrush or paint brush and then wipe off the areas where it smears on the tile. I used it on my kitchen floor and it really made a huge difference.

I should mention a few more things. It's not necessarily that I was made to feel stupid or wrong, I see others (usually inexperienced in the particular topic) that have their comments shredded by the self-appointed experts and feel empathy for them. I started this thread after looking for and not finding an old post from the Ponds and Aquatic Plants GW forum several years ago that really stuck with me. The poster was a biologist that was very generous with his time and knowledge and that forum was lucky to have him. He had a lot of experience and understood water quality issues that typical water gardening enthusiasts encounter while pursuing their hobby. Another poster, a woman was in tears at the advice given by the forum 'expert' that she 'must' tear her pond out and install bottom drains or her 12,000-gallon pond would become a cesspool. This modification was beyond her budget and since she'd been told by the resident self-appointed expert (not the real expert, the biologist) that she was killing her koi by not following this advice, she was looking for people to adopt her mature koi and she was on verge of shutting down the pond. She had been maintaining this huge pond in her yard for 20+ years and it had always been healthy, no fish kills or water quality issues and it brought her a great deal of happiness. She merely posted asking for advice about an extended suspended algae or green water issue and foam from DOCs. The biologist came to her rescue with an alternate treatment that did not require ripping out the pond and starting over. There was a huge pissing match between the 'forum expert' and this actual expert about the fact that all ponds must have bottom drains. In the end, the pond hobbyist cleared her pond water using a low tech solution suggested by the biologist allowing her to keep her pond (and happy place). The biologist posted a couple of weeks later about the forums often having self-appointed experts that offered the same tired advice over and over. His words were a work of art and I wish I could find that post. Bossyvossy, I am right there with you on spider lilies. I must have 5 different plants that were passed to me as 'spider lilies'. Some are hymenocallis, some crinum, some lycoris and even a cleome! Proper plant nomenclature is important, I do agree. I just wish that these experts could be a bit more diplomatic when speaking to inexperienced horticulturalists. I just don't think that it's a good practice to shame someone else just to be 'right'.