IMO you have to have the right style house for beadboard ceilings to succeed - you can't just chuck them up anywhere with any ol' kind of decor and architecture. Ditto for coffered ceilings, IMO. 3-dimensional ceiling treatments are tricky. (I've finally got DH really sold on tin ceilings for this house - steered him past a display of it at the home center and subtly made him think it was his idea LOL - but it'll have to wait until we find out if the downstairs ceilings have to come down to fix the "trampoline floors" upstairs. Bleh.) As long as it's never been painted, removing popcorn ceiling material is easy, if messy, so doing that part yourselves could save you some real money. Demo work always costs more than it seems like it ought to and it can be awfully therapeutic. ;-) Remove all the furniture from the room, cover the floors with waterproof disposable tarps (run them up the wall several inches and use wide painter's tape to secure them so water won't run under the baseboard, and tape the tarps together too) and turn the electricity off to the room and remove or cover light fixtures. If you have nice wallpaper or easily-damaged paint on the walls, tape plastic over the walls too. Even though it looks idiotic put on a shower cap, trust me on that, and oversized safety glasses. Get yourself a garden sprayer - the kind with the hose and canister - fill it with warm water, and wet the popcorn stuff down. Let it sit for a few minutes. Chances are some of it will start splatting on the floor all by itself but scrape gently at it with a wide scraper. You can even get scrapers that will screw onto a threaded wooden pole (like old-fashioned broomsticks), they're in the paint department at Lowes/HD, so you don't have to teeter on a stepstool or ladder. You may need to wet stubborn areas down more but you don't want to saturate the drywall. You may not be able to get every trace off but once the ceiling dries you can go over it quickly with a sanding screen on a pole sander and knock off any stubborn bits. Roll/fold up the tarp with the popcorn glop still on it for disposal; if there's a lot of water and you have a shop-vac available, by all means use that to suck up as much of the water as you can. All the supplies together would cost less than $100, maybe $150 if you needed a LOT of plastic (that's not counting a shop-vac, but that's not mandatory, and you might be able to mooch one off your contractor friend), once you get the hang of it it goes fast, and your contractor will have a nice clean surface all ready for skimcoating. If you're up to painting you could just have the contractor do the actual drywall-finishing work, saving you even more money. IMO if you put up beadboard or something on the ceiling I do think it would be best to remove the popcorn anyway in order to have a smooth surface to work with, but you can do a bit more mickey-mouse job of it. ;-) I think 8 foot ceilings are wonderful... my previous house had 7 foot ceilings (and slanted ones upstairs that went down to 3 feet high). In this house I'm blessed by ceilings a little over 8 1/2 feet (depending on where you measure LOL) downstairs and upstairs again those angled ones that go from 8 feet to 4 feet.

No absolutely have never felt they are too high - I feel like lower would be annoying for conversation because when we host we routinely have people at the island while we are cooking and preparing , setting out food etc. I got our tiles from a local tile store- there wasn't a brand name on the box. it just said Made in Spain.

LARA, It's the same math: If you have 99 ( 8 feet is btw 96" , not 99 ) " and you have a light that IN TOTAL mount and fixture uses up 26 inches, you will have 37 inches from the bottom of the light to the counter top. If you have 96 inches...now you have 34 inches to counter top. If you want to know how it will look, on any you select? You get yourself a ruler, and you draw it out, using one inch, to one foot scale. Chain is easier than stem......so you really need to pay attention to specs, and mounting details. The length of your island must also be VERY much considered. Any solid shade will read heavier and larger than an open lantern or glass shade. Solid shades will direct light to the counter top, and more open or clear fixtures will give you more dispersed light.

My experience talking with you, @Jan, and others about pendant placement has been tremendously helpful! I am so grateful! I would like to offer a thank you in the form of sharing a creative little trick that came to me today when I was trying to use @Jan's diagram to make the marks on the ceiling for the electrician. Those of you who have experience with decorating, probably have tricks like this and maybe what I came up with is not novel. But it was new to me and so I'll share it in the hopes it helps someone else. So here's the "trick": I had read that it's a good idea to use wrapping paper and cut out squares of the same diameter as your pendant and then place the squares on the floor where the island will be. So I cut out 19 inch squares and then I folded each square into a triangle, as you can see in photo. Next I snipped off the point of the triangle so that when you open up the paper and lay it flat, you have a little hole in the center of the square! So, armed with @Jan's diagram, my husband and I went to work on the floor where the island will be. The contractor had already marked the island off with tape. So all we did, was measure 15 inches from each long end, and at that point we placed one of the squares down on the floor. Next we took a pen and marked the center of the hole in the square. This represents the spot on the floor that's directly under where the electrician will put the center of the mounting plate on the ceiling. Then, to find where to put the mark on the ceiling, my husband used a laser and we marked the spot with tape! :)