I'm rooting for you!!! By the way, they can be eaten, but the flesh is very dark and has a flavor best described as earthy. And their hides can be used on banjos and/or banjo-ukuleles.....Elder

Sand and stain color desired. Imperfections you want to keep will bleed through.

I have done cooktops over ovens in the past, but not in a very long time. But yes, it's doable. Just need to work with an appliance person to make sure the clearances work. The height of the cooktop's burner box is key. The shorter, the better. I remember back in the 80's, this was a very sleek, European look. Here are pics I found online...notice in a couple pics, the countertop is thicker...that may be due to cooktop/oven clearances. Burner boxes today are slightly taller than in the past. 3" below the countertop surface used to be standard...I think they're taller now. If you reuse your old cooktop, it might be a shorter height...try to find out the make/model of your cooktop. Ps. some people don't like the single wall ovens installed under the counter because it puts the oven kind of low.

I was disappointed with the TV show. I found it melodramatic and an overstatement of Oppenheimer's contribution to the project. Never before nor since have so many theoretical and experimental physicists worked together under one roof (so to speak) on one project. There were nearly 20 Nobel laureates ultimately among them. The entire group stood on the shoulders of giants, many of whom they knew personally, because so many of the major breakthroughs had been made in the preceding few decades by others. There were so many major individual contributions made in the project that to point to any few of them or their contributors would be arbitrary. There's no question that Oppenheimer played a major role in the project as a leader. He understood and was conversant with the work being done and so was respected enough that the cats allowed him to herd them. While obviously a very, very smart guy, he had not been a productive theoretician before nor after the project was done and at least as a person interested in the subject, I've not come across any accounts praising his technical contributions to the work. Obviously from the standpoint of the TV show and I presume the forthcoming movie, it makes a better story to focus eyes on the personality of one person. Not the only one in the group but one very complicated, often confused, and often a socially and politically naive person. I've read both Rhodes books (I liked the first one better), American Prometheus, as well as 109 East Palace (Conant) and several others. For lighter and more entertaining reading on the subject and many of the people involved, I recommend reading any (better many) of the books by or about Richard Feynmann. He worked at Los Alamos as a newly minted PhD and made several major contributions, when not spending time being a generally goofy practical joker much of the time. Another recommendation for anyone interested in this topic is to visit Los Alamos. There are interesting things to see there in the town, open to visitors. Not least of which is the museum that has two scale models of each of the two different bomb types that were used against Japan. Most of the WW2 era buildings are long gone but it remains an active national laboratory (access to which premises are of course, like other national labs, closed).