Thanks so much for all the great ideas! I was really nervous about the distressed black cabinets, but I am gaining confidence with each nice comment! :-) I do like the thought of moving the DW...will have to talk to the hubby about that one. The pass through REALLY bugs me. The only thing it gets used for is to sit junk on it and for my husband to check out the TV! I would be blowing out that wall for sure, but the room on the other side is a sunken family room so there would be an awkward height thing going on...plus, the entire soffit has to stay...grr...so that chunk of it would always be randomly sticking out. I really like the idea of putting up open shelves or maybe another section of cabinetry and then doing decorative glass front cabinets on each side of the microwave. And I am going to play around with trim to disguise the soffit like some others did. I am also concerned about the fridge sticking out too much. The new one we looked at is going to stick out another 3 inches than the one we already have. Its also much taller than the one we have and the cabinet above will have to come out. I was thinking about building a wine rack to go in the narrow leftover space. (I know its not the best for the wine, but I don't really drink it so it would be mostly decorative.) Any thoughts about pendants vs. recessed over the peninsula? By the way, my husband is in the garage right now doing a test panel of the cabinets. Per recommendations found on this forum, we are trying MH Ready Patch to cover the grain in the wood. Amazingly, it seems to be working! I think he'll have one primer coat on tonight (luckily we have access to a spray booth for the big project) so we'll see how that turns out. Hope might just exist for those of us with builder's grade orange oak! :-) I saw a few threads regarding this topic that seemed to have a lot of questions but died out, so I will try to update our status. Thank you thank you!

Thanks. Wouldn't change a thing. It's a 13 X 13 square with a 6 foot triangle cut off one of the corners, so about 151 square feet. It's the biggest town would allow 10 feet off property line. We have cold water only; going to add a point of use water heater this summer to feed a sink in the kitchenette, and an outside shower along the right side of the cabana. Using a dry well only drain, no sewer. No bathroom, too much $$ to run the plumbing. We are putting in a bathroom by our screened porch that will accessible from outdoors. We have a Jandy heater, had to, hot tub.....

Yes it is tied. I only handquilt and would never be able to finish it in two weeks like I did this one. I also know he will drag it all over the house and down to my mom's for sleep overs. It wouldn't last long enough to make it worth it to quilt it. Thank you for the kind comments. I can't wait to see his face when he opens it. I've been making it late at night so he wouldn't find out. Lynette

You know, we didn't price laminate because I was removing it, and had ALWAYS had it everywhere I ever lived. I wanted something different. I can tell you that our best granite quote was $5,000, and solid surface from Lowe's would have been a little over $2,000. We wanted an undermount sink and I didn't like how they looked with the laminate displays at Lowes, plus I really didn't want laminate at this time. However, with laminate you can purchase it, install it and you're done. With butcher block, you have to put on multiple coats of your finish. Allowing drying time and completing each coat is time consuming. We were able to purchase our butcher block for right around $600. Ikea sells great butcher block as well however, it would have cost an additional $350 to have it shipped to our home and I would have had to buy it sight unseen, something I wasn't comfortable with. Another low cost option to consider could be concrete. I have a friend who installed it in her brand new home and it is lovely. I saw a blog at one time of someone doing their own concrete counters right over their laminate and it really turned out nice. It was very low cost. You also could always do a countertop treatment of some sort or install sheets of laminate over your current counter. These options weren't a possibility for us because our sink hole had been cut out by our previous owner way too big, and we had some water damage from our leaky faucet. We had to completely replace our counters. A friend of ours that just completely renovated their kitchen installed tile counters. They are beautiful, I just wouldn't have wanted to deal with the grout. I will look for the concrete counter blog and post it if I can find it.