I _think_ rev-a-shelf makes many different kinds of openers. Maybe they all have fancy names to distinguish them and I never paid attention? Maybe that's why sometimes you find items in the clearance that look like what's still selling at MSRP, even with the same numbers; maybe the closing systems change? I have a trash pullout that looks like badgergals, but there's some signficant resistance to pulling it out. I don't mind it, but it's not "soft". I have another trash pullout that's a completely different design. There are no pulleys or mechanism, really, for opening. They just glide out - smaller, aluminum cans. That's very easy pull out-puch in, but there's no self-closing mechanism at all. It's also RAS. To tell you the truth, it none of it matters to me all that much. Not as much as some other annoyance-parameters in the kitchen. I think a lot of thought goes into all this blum/soft-close hardware stuff when it may not quite warrant all that attention, at least not comparatively. YMMV of course. And I'm not saying it's not good to think about this stuff. Just that IMO making a "mistake" on this decision won't be really terribly horrible. =0.02 Badger, those curved cabinets of yours are so very elegant!

We have doors along one wall that are 16", 19", and 18" because of the way the sizing worked out, and on the other wall it's a series of 18" cabs next to one 19"---it's really not noticeable. As long as none of them are really big or really small, your eye sees them as approximately the same size. (On our 18"/19" wall even I didn't know they were different until I was measuring for drawer inserts and realized the drawers were different widths---the cabinetmaker had adjusted the original all-18" design to fill the space available.) I'd go with maximizing the storage space, if it means you can avoid filler or tiny spaces.

Lavender_Lass, I'm glad to hear you love your wall oven! Everyone who has one seems to. I think I'll enjoy it, myself, and DH is already thrilled with the idea - he's even been checking them out at appliance stores, and he's never been that interested in ovens before. I agree that the space would really open up without the peninsula. We could do a small table and keep it simple at first, but we'd have the room in the future to expand a little, add chairs. Ashleymking, I actually love the open counter space of the peninsula, myself, and if it weren't for DH's bad back and therefore the desire for a wall oven, I'd almost certainly keep the peninsula. The 30" walkway is definitely too narrow, though - I would gladly sacrifice the peninsula space for a larger walkway. It feels cramped just looking at it from across the room. This may not apply in your layout, but for us, looking in through the dining room door, the peninsula actually extends into that line of sight, so if you walk straight across the room you could walk into it. More importantly, it's a real bottleneck for people passing through. Only one person can comfortably pass at a time (2 if you don't mind brushing up against one another!), and with an active 3-yr-old and 2 little dogs, we feel like we're constantly telling someone to get out of the way. This is compounded by the layout of the refrigerator being just off the end of the peninsula, so the walkway is totally blocked if someone opens the fridge door. It doesn't sound like a big deal - of course you can just wait a moment until the person at the fridge is done - but it annoys us every day. We felt that between 40 - 44" would work for us, larger being better. We arrived at that number partly by looking at recommendations in posts here on GW and partly by looking at the sight lines through the doors, measuring ourselves standing there 2-deep and just imagining "what if I wanted to do X..." scenarios. Well, there's my novel about our walkway, LOL! Hope that's useful to you. Marthasdream, it's funny, I had considered open shelving for the plans with the peninsula but didn't think of it with the wall oven/ open plan. Thanks for the reminder that they could still work there! My open shelf fantasy is actually to have a set of 2 or 3 with some room on one for cookbooks, and the bottom shelf having hooks for my most-often used pans. Perhaps the dream isn't dead!

Pulling this oldish thread back up for an update. Edited to ad: The actual switch/install happened this morning. KD ended up trading me the old, small trash pullout setup for a new one, with larger double bins. I paid her (the cabinet company) an extra $50 some-odd and paid the contractor to come down & switch them for me. Contractor took the old unit to give to KD. I'd wondered if it was simple & I could do it myself, but it turned out that there were some things (an outlet & a water line) that were in the way (despite my measurements,) and contractor was able to adjust things so that it fit - but there's no way I could have done it - so I made the right decision in having him come down. I'm so glad to have my old trash/recycling out of the basement landing!