BEAUTIFUL! You have to enjoy working in your garden, because it is really well tended and planned also. Love it. I see your high chain link fence is like my back fence....7 foot tall and 100 feet long. I've planted Confederate jasmine...or trachelospermum jasminoides....or something sounds like that? It is evergreen here, and makes a gorgeous privacy fence withing a few years. Maybe in 4 years but by 5 it is very effective....they use it in Italy everywhere, including to climb over arbors, up old stairways, and covering fences to create a living privacy fence. Let me recommend it to you for that purpose. If you like, I'll create a Flickr album about the use of this jasmine in Italian gardens (the ones I saw anyway) in Umbria. Etc. Here the cabana was covered in blooming jasmine, the short fence covered in the jasmine is kept trimmed as a short hedge, no hint of the chainlink frame holding it up inside.

what do you like? The cabinets are going to be the "in for the long haul" element. Dark counters with a little sparkle can look great, or lightish as well....I wouldn't worry about the floor.....mats end up on tile[hardness] and potentially someone would swap the tile for a more resilient product in the future, but be inclined to leave good cabinets...so I'd see what would be appealing with the cabs. What is the style of the cabs?....the stain sounds warm and nice.

There very well may be gaps that the splash is covering that the tile won't, however, you'll probably be able to float your wall to make it work. The differing height tops won't look odd with tile. Place a continuous shim the thickness of your grout lines on your main top to start tiling. Install the tile, grout, pull the shim, then fill the gap with color matching caulk.

Joseph Corlett, the existing edge profile is eased. Is it more difficult to seam to finished edges? Will there be cutting/grinding required in the house? I imagined that they would get the two pieces cut to size and attach them, maybe with some supports underneath. Is it more complicated than that? Should I just get a new countertop instead of considering this patch job? damiarain, thank you for all the links of the drawer units under induction cooktop. I am aware that there are clearance concerns for the top drawer. However, all photos there also show new countertops under the cooktops, which brings me back to the original question of how required a new countertop is for a cooktop install. This discussion is telling me that this new cooktop installation is more complicated that I originally imagined. I thought replacing 30" range with 30" cooktop would pretty standard. I need to consider leaving the range in place until I get enough money to get a new cooktop, drawer units AND a countertop.