I am having a lot of anxiety over this area and am really hoping for some guidance from all the experienced and gifted posters out there - please! We decided on absolute black honed for the counter - now need to decide the thickness. This dining room butler's pantry in the expanded dining room was suppose to appear like 2 independent furniture pieces. KD's goal was nothing like a kitchenette (or the adjacent kitchen) so he did not want 10 feet of a counter - hence the brown "china cabinet" piece steps back from the black "buffet counter" BUT he also planned for the counter heights to be different. The china cabinet has a thick (almost 4") of a wood slab between base and uppers. And he planned for 2 cm for the buffet. I know it is hard from these pictures (I'll try to get by there to get better ones today) but if we use 2 cm granite as recommended by the KD there will be only like 3/4 of an inch difference. If we use 3cm it could be shimmed up slightly to line up with the base of the routed edge on the dining room piece and seem in line. I don't want the 2cm to look like a mistake - a just miss BUT if the design with the step back already commits us to "mismatch" pieces I don't want to do it half way. HELP. I am at the end of a long line of too many decisions and just want this done and moving forward. Any help, suggestions, questions etc. would be GREATLY appreciated.

Plenty here have wood tops with undermount sinks. Some wood companies do say you can't do sinks with their tops, but there are products that seal wood just fine. I don't see what the difference is between undercount vs drop-in. With undermount, you just seal the cut ends and the area under the top around the sink. I'm planning a wood top with prep sink for my island. Wood worker is making it as I type.

I agree with the others, but I'm not quite as emphatic, having just finished a large, pressed-for-time renovation. It was hard--very hard--and we lived in the house (with a child) while it was going on, which made it even harder. Being able to still live in another place while you renovate is an advantage. How long have you lived in Seattle? Have you lived here long enough to fully appreciate how dark and gray it is for so very, very long? I ask because I've seen people move here from other areas and buy houses that they end up hating because there's not enough light. In undertaking a large renovation here (Seattle), I think it's important to be very sure that the house has enough light for you. We ended up adding a couple of windows and some skylights when we did our renovation, and that was as a direct result of having lived here for a while and realizing that there were certain areas of our house where we were desperate for more light. It's hard to know these things without having lived in the house. If you do decided to go ahead, please think carefully about how much natural light you get there. Don't decide based on the light in there over the next few days when it's supposed to be sunnier! In this climate, I really think that fewer uppers and more windows (even with a brick exterior) can help make a kitchen more enjoyable. I do agree with the others that not having lived in the house makes a rushed renovation even harder. We did ours in a similar kind of rush to what you're planning. However, we had lived here for years first, and we knew what issues we had to fix. We'd talked about incorporating two spaces into the kitchen for years. All that casual talk for years ahead of time helped make our very rushed decisions much easier. I can't imagine trying to make all those decisions without having had the basic ideas already in mind from before. If you do decide to go ahead, please post your layouts here and let people go over them. There is a huge amount of wisdom here, and that's something you have on your side--you've found GW! Take advantage of the experience and knowledge you'll get here. It's very helpful to people here if you post both your current kitchen layout and a legible floorplan of your entire first floor. Good luck!

for the handles, may I suggest something to pick up on the hues in the flooring? A little more copper toned. you have light cabs, light floors. I think throwing in a dark ORB w/o actual copper highlights would be too much of a contrast. IMO. cypress park Sandra, I like the porcelain one better than the other one. Does the backsplash have to be done immediately? If the tones in the porcelain tile you picked clash w/the ivory tones in the counter, it could be a problem. However, I did find some copper toned ones that should be avail. these are porcelain/SS, and treated so as not to stain or tarnish. I LOVE these for your kitchen. timeless and gorgeous. They are probably not super cheap, but it would be worth it for me. http://www.miusartmosaics.com/arabesque-lantern-beacon-copper-tile-in these would also work. the site is here: maybe they have them in stock.http://www.westsidetile.com/arabesque-tiles/ i like this one too. notice the copper faucet. beautiful w/the glass mosaic. if you got the cream countertop, this would look amazing w/your floors. this last one is a copper colored slate/quartzite.