I'm very fortunate that Mum will accept help from people, but she suffered a stroke and couldn't "work" her left side, so help was REQUIRED. And she was aware enough to know it. She has a tub in her bathroom. When she came home after close to 10 weeks in the hospital and two rehabs. we'd changed out the shower head for a shower massage, gotten a shower seat, installed handrails, put the arms on the toilet. I hired a woman to come thrice weekly to assist her with bathing. She went from the strict supervision of the NH to a private aid and there was NO FUSS. In fact, she LOVES the attention. Try the bath again and tell her it's a luxury to have someone help you bathe... all the great queens throughout history have had bath maidens... ;) The woman who comes to help Mum is very nice... chitty-chatty, efficient, and very patient. Whenever there is a Monday holiday I offer it to her. If she takes it, I pay her for it. She's earned that. We got off to a bit of a rocky start, but once I reminded her of what I expected, she did it. Reliability is worth a lot.

Almost all my ceilings are painted Navajo White. I know that's not one of the new choices but just mentioning I've seen the color IRL. I have samples of Muslin and Natural Wicker. I like both colors but if my memory is working right, the Muslin has red in it which I remember seeing a slight pink tone when looking at painted poster board sample. Out of all the samples I tried, this one really looked pink to my eye. Natural Wicker was nice but was too light. I ended up actually not even using that room right now and when the time comes, I'm going to use Manchester Tan - which I know is darker than what you're talking about here. The room also gets lots of sun. I would definitely check out the paint samples in the room. A nice neutral you might consider checking out is SW Aria Ivory (it's a retired color). Miss Mustard Seed used this in her house and I really liked the sample I bought. If you look around on her blog more, you'll see a lot more photos of this color than what's shown in the link. Here is a link that might be useful: MissMustardSeed blog - aria ivory

I'm in a large reno project in ATL now. It's a bit larger in scope than this, but it includes a complete kitchen gut and wall teardown too like yours. Our project evolved, as many do, from "let's touch up a bathroom and kitchen" to a small expansion of the overall house to "complete gut down the studs" on the whole house pretty much. Along the way, we got a look at several different types of outfits: 1-man shops, medium sized outfits, design-build firms, and full service GCs. Free advice (worth what you pay): - I strongly urge you to seek other bids. At least 3, 5 would be better. - Your project fits in what I would call "the Bermuda Triangle" of remodeling projects. It's not a small job where you can get away using a GC outfit with small overhead. These guys often have lack of organization / project mgt. skills, but on small jobs with limited scope the risk of that may be worth the reward. On larger jobs, you would use an architect and/or a designer up front to draw plans/specs...then you bid out to the GCs and its easier to compare apples to apples. Sounds like you are trying to use a smaller type outfit, and combine that with no secondary bids and no formal plans/specs prior to signing a contract. This is a recipe for disaster, in my opinion. - You are getting too much into the weeds too quickly trying to examine line item by item, and wonder what is appropriate. Some I saw were fine, some were low for sure, and some seemed maybe high. Doesn't matter. You can't see the forest for the tree. Step back and consider your whole approach, with more careful upfront planning, before you spend a dime. We planned for almost 2 years before selecting a GC finally and breaking ground. But we finally found the right approach and partner, and its gone reasonably well. We've had change orders, but they've been fairly small "gotchas" or nice-to-have upgrades we felt were worth spending the $ now vs. later. - I would think about a design-build firm for this type project. It wasn't for us, but I think they can help provide some discipline up front to your planning and scope. If you don't like that approach, do some more research on fixed price vs. cost-plus contracts and make darn sure you understand the which party bears what risk in each contract. Good luck, keep us posted.

yes the new piece should match the old. no that chip on the edge is not acceptable. it should be a smooth cut. don't know about the rough spot. and yes, if it's not right, don't accept it. We didn't. We finally called the owner of the company when we were having problems because they cut one piece too small and wanted us to accept the seam where we didn't want it. That was after we paid extra for them to hand cut the corner so we wouldn't have the seam in the corner but instead we wanted the seam under the edge of our appliance garage. It took them going to the east coast of the state to find a matching piece of granite and they had to recut the whole L area but they did it and it's gorgeous. Don't accept shoddy work.