If you look at furniture made by Shakers, it has 5 piece for the doors and slab for the drawers. They liked simplicity and used 5 piece for the doors where it was useful to counter the dimensional changes of wood but not in drawer fronts which were small enough to make from a single board. Since they didn't have modern drawer glides, their furniture usually doesn't have the deep drawers that we have today. That was the look we wanted so we went for slab on the shorter drawers and 5-piece shaker doors and drawers higher than 8". Since our lowers are mainly drawers, that also makes for easier cleaning when something drips from the counter. Hi Pharoh, the old fridge died so it is now replaced with a magnetless stainless fridge. :) Lovely cabinets Circus peanut - like the way the arches in the trim match the range base.

Hey abbeycat - your cabinets look beautiful - I don't think they look country at all! I guess it depends which style you liked better, the shaker or the slab... Sounds like you're more of a slab person. :-) I wanted the big drawers not to stand out so much in style from the cabinet doors. Plus I love my shaker style and wanted as much of it as possible - it's a wide shaker with 3" rails & stiles. I thought it looked a little more contemporary than the standard shaker. (After I'd ordered the cabinets, it occurred to me to wonder how they were going to do 3" rails on 6" high drawers... or would the 6" drawers be slab after all. Turned out they did 2" rails with 3" stiles - looks great!) Someday I'll have photos to post. My contractor messed up my cabinet installation... I'm currently waiting for the replacement cabinets to come in. (Sigh.)

I have a pulls that are similar in style to the ones you are using. My doors are not slab but if they were I think I still would have put the pulls in the same location. The bottom edge of my upper door pulls is 2" from the bottom edge of the cabinet door. (on my base doors the top edge of the pull is 2" from the top edge of the cabinet door. Here is a visual of the uppers for you: Since I personally don't care for the look of pulls in the middle of the drawer, I had my pulls mounted near the top on both the slab drawers and five piece drawers. The pulls are one inch fro the top edge of the drawers. Here's how that configuration looks: If you do a google search with the terms gardenweb and pull placement you should be able to find lots of previous posts with pictures and opinions. As you will see there is no rule. All you need to do is decide the look you like.

For the pass through, I am thinking that something like this would look a lot simpler/cleaner and less fussy. So you'd be keeping the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room that you were going to close and losing the two tall skinny vertical stacks of cabinets on either side of the passthrough. Not only would that visually break up some of the continuous walls of cabinetry, but instead of that whole complicated area where the oven met the pass through, you'd just have a nice clean, straight line of cabinetry dying into the wall and some open space. Visually, that corner of the kitchen will be a lot less heavy and won't compete with the range for focus. Also, functionally, if you are going to be using the dining room more often, I think it'll be nice to have the dining room that much more open and accessible to the kitchen. My last visual issue is how the angled windows now relate to absolutely nothing. They used to match the island angle and curve around a table. There were reasons for the wall to be like that. Particularly with everything else in the new kitchen's being so square and symmetrical, that architectural oddity looks SO out of place. You might at least do something like this to the island:And maybe do a range hood in an especially angular shape to tie into it all. This one that I posted earlier would probably work: You can see how that would related more to the window/island angles than something like this (made of curves and straight lines) would: When you repeat an element 2-3 times around a room, it looks like a deliberate design choice. With exactly one angle (the windows) in the room now, it doesn't look deliberate. That said, while I think any/all of those changes would make the kitchen look a lot better, it doesn't really address the functional layout problems that make this mostly a one-person kitchen. I'll do a different comment with some suggestions about that. Usually, you determine how much space you have, your goals, and then the general layout that would make the kitchen function best. THEN you figure out how to make the kitchen look pretty with everything where it needs to be to function best. It's always possible to make a functional kitchen beautiful. It is VERY difficult to do the reverse. And just brace yourself -- total symmetry is an enemy of function. The most useful kitchens have things staggered around the room so that people are not on top of each other when using them.