Thanks for the input. I'm scouring the interwebs for photos and it is surprising how many images have no faucets shown at all. It looks like people with the 1 3/4 either put the faucet in the center of the overall width or at the divide. I'm thinking the divide would work best. Then the soap could go to the left in the center of the large bowl? Not sure of the spacing, but I don't use the soap on the veggies, so the left make sense to me, too. Maybe the filtered water dispenser centered on the smaller bowl? Or should it be off to the corner? I'm sure this is one of the 99 million decisions I will not think about after it's made. Well, unless I screw it up, of course! I don't think these come with holes, do they? Or do they have those punch-out areas, I'm not sure what they're called.

Are you talking about using either 2 cm or 3 cm slabs? I've never actually seen them measured in inches. Presuming that's what you mean, there are a lot of threads on that topic here. Type "2 cm vs 3 cm granite site:gardenweb.com" into your search engine and you'll turn some up. The bottom line is that you can use either for your islands. The 2 cm slabs are placed with a plywood underlayment and generally have another 2 cm strip of granite laminated onto the edge to give a nice edge finish and cover up the plywood. 3 cm slabs don't need an underlayment and have a nice fat edge for finishing built in. 2 cm slabs are more popular (i.e. more available) on the west coast and 3 cm more popular on the east coast, but that is not a universal comment on availability. I live on the west coast and I have 3 cm granite. Functionally you can go either way and be comfortable about your decision. When you're looking at costs, be sure to factor in the extra fabrication expense for the laminated edge and the extra expense of fabricating a stone that eats up the fabricator's saw blades like the really hard quartzites.

If the difference in color is due to the slabs having been in the sun, then won't the rest of the counter later lighten to match? It is all exposed to light now. I would worry that repolishing the tops in the shop won't produce as good a surface as they have now because the shop doesn't have the tools that are used for polishing large surfaces that they slab producer had. splais, it looks to me like your foot is still in your mouth - now you are saying that Inerseian was careless in selecting the stone? When placing templates on stone, there are a lot of things to consider - sometimes one accepts less match in one place to get a better match elsewhere or to display the part of the stone one wants in a prominent place. Ineresian's counter looks great and I can understand the choice that was made there. One leg of our L is almost as long as the length of our slabs and the other leg was about as long as the length plus width of them so the only way to do the L with only one seam was to have the seam at the sink with the lengths of the slabs at right angles - no book match possible there. Also, we wanted to position the slabs on the stone to have a match between the counters of the L's and the backsplash pieces and we needed a couple of other long pieces placed for our window sill and outside counter. We were able to position the two sides of the seam where the granite movement was swirly so the lack of a grain match doesn't stand out but there is a bit of a color shift at the seam. A few inches of not perfect match on the seam was worth it to us to not have an extra seam and to have matches the other places we wanted. We spent a few hours with the fabricator placing the template on the slabs and getting all the pieces to fit.

If your fabricator is making granite seams with silicone, you need to find another fabricator. They don't have the latest version of Gorilla Grips either; the new ones will pull seams at sinks. I watched Steve, the GG inventor, do it at a trade show recently. You can use the old ones to make sink seams, you've just got to use a bar clamp with them. Good fabricators can have different opinions about seaming at sinks, but there is no technical reason why it can't be done. With proper leveling and adhesive, you can expect no problems.