I got the hood as a closeout from a distributors for $400. I know.... I got a huge deal. I still had to supply the blower but got a 1200 CFM blower on closeout as well! The hood was Independent Hoods but they went out of biz during the recession....which is why the store was closing out all their stock. I think you could find something very similar from Modern-Aire in California. I love the curved design...it's been a dream to clean. Rarely shows finger prints or smudges!!!

hi, I'm back! was a busy weekend. I spent many a long summer day on Nauset Beach. It is THE best. I am north of Boston in Cape Ann. Bethpen, that is great that your cabinets are holding up so well. My in-laws have them in their kitchen and they are really nice, but I think they spent in the order of $60-70K on the cabinets alone. I priced them when we did our kitchen and they came in at the high end ($34K). We went with Crown Point whose original quote was about $26K (we managed to add a few items and I think the final was pushing $28K). The Woodmode cabinets I saw the other day were really beautiful and they had been highly customized by my teacher so I got a lot of good ideas. School has been a great adventure. I am loving it. So far it isn't taking too much of a toll on anyone. I stay up late to do my homework so that it doesn't come out of the kids time. Angelina... I did not get the color names on those cabinets. Sorry not to be able to help with that. Is your sample on the way? When I looked at Woodmode, the dealer had a number of kitchens set up and all the door styles and colors to see. Is your dealer close enough to visit? Good luck with it. Picking the cabinet color was the hardest part for me (and made a little easier by the fact that we opted to save money by not going with a custom color... I can't even imagine the headaches that'd caused). Good luck.

Hi Nicole, We ended up going with Plain and Fancy in painted white with the frameless MDF style, because we really liked the way their doors looked. With the amount of money we were spending, we felt it was worth it to get something we loved rather than something that's merely okay. One of the doors arrived damaged, but was quickly replaced. We love the cabinets. I think the paint has held up well, given that we have three kids (a teenager and two toddlers, and I'm not sure which are tougher on the cabinets). There's some visible vertical lines as the paint has split at the joints on some drawer and door panels, which is expected with time on painted cabinets - and is worse next to the dishwasher / microwave, due to the heat and humidity. And the paint is scuffed off on some of the corners of frequently used drawers. There are some dings and dents on the sides of some frequently used doors and drawers, probably due to us hitting them with various objects. But I'm sure that I'm nitpicking, since I'm looking at the cabinets closely every day. I think if someone came in and took a look at the kitchen, without carefully examining every drawer panel, they'd say it looks great. I will say that the installer is as important as the cabinets. We went with a cheaper installer, because they were $1k+ cheaper, and kind of wish we hadn't. They ended up nicking and scratching the insides of some of the glass door hanging cabinets while installing, and while you can touch it up it's never going to look as good as it originally did.

In your shoes ... knowing I am likely facing cost and time over-runs on the project ... I would ask myself what it's worth to have a better functioning temporary kitchen now. If you need quality and you need it fast, the rule of thumb is that you will pay extra for it. But if you can improve your temporary situation to the point you don't feel like you have to rush then you can remove rush charges (and probably save yourself some mistakes along the way). So - do you still have a working dishwasher & sink? Can you get them back if they were removed? Of course, all of this is assuming you didn't have to pay a deposit to WoodMode - if you did then my first concern would be getting that money back. If you paid something to the KD to send to WoodMode, it's reasonable to ask "I paid a $10k deposit and I would like to see information about how much of that deposit was your commission versus what was sent to WoodMode." I'm sorry this is happening to so many people right now, it is so much money at stake.