Yeah... a little late to the game here for the original posters, but it's just a fundamental difference in opinion between the actual "cooks" out here who have the desire and or skills to make use of features in high performance pro-style ranges, and the other camp who more-or-less just use ranges to "reheat" foods and boil water for pasta, frozen veggies, etc. Apples and oranges. Any poster who uses an electric cooktop or (gasp) flat surface range and is content with it does not in any way intend to use a range/oven to produce professional-type cooking products. Baking perhaps... but not cooking. Find a thread posted by amateur chefs and/or professional chefs who cook at home if you want informative opinions on pro-style ranges ... IF you intend to use them as they are intended to be used.

I second weedmeister's suggestions and clarify that the advantage of running, say, a 700 CFM hood on a low setting, (say 400 CFM draw) is that it will be noticeably quieter than a 400CFM hood at full power. I've had 36" a Zephyr Cyclone hood for ten years, but I'm not sure I would recommend it to everybody, especially if you are building new. It is rated at 600 CFM but it has a flat base and is only about 20-inches deep (front to back). I got it because of the CFM rating and because it is only 5-inches tall. The height was important in my situation because I needed a short height to fit over my stove and under my cabinets in my small, old-house kitchen. There are many range hoods now that have a similar flat-bottom design which does not collect steam and vapors the way a deeper hood will. If you are building new, consider designing the cabinets to allow a deeper hood over the stove. My Zephyr keeps up only by running on high or very high settings. Those are never quiet. I will say that the Zephyr has done a very good job of separating grease from vapors. It does such a good job of separating grease from vapors that, When I re-did the over-the-stove cabinets and relocated the vent ducting this last winter, there was very little grease to clean out of the ducting. If I were building new, where I was not constrained by existing layouts and tiny kitchens in old houses, I would look pretty seriously at the Kobe line that Weed suggested. Also, if you are a member of Costco, you might want to look at the Ancona hoods sold there. I've heard good things about them although I have no first hand experience. The great thing about Costco purchases is that they have a no-questions asked return policy so you can take it back if you do not like it. You could then swap in a Kobe or something else that you liked. On the side issue of coil burners, my personal take is that coil burners are fine. Mature technology. Plain. Simple. Durable. Reliable. Reasonably efficient. Rather inexpensive. Well suited to constant heat applications such as cooking with cast iron and doing things like making stocks and running canning kettles. But, if the only reason that you are sticking with a coil-burner is to avoid surface marring caused by cast-iron pans, there are a variety of reasons you might want to consider an induction range. To begin with, as others have pointed out, cast iron is not a problem on the smooth surface of an induction cooktop. (Viking, the maker of the most expensive residential induction range you buy in the US at this time, has published a manual for the stove which forbids the use of cast iron on its induction stove because it might somehow damage the stove by retaining heat. Viking stands alone in that arrant nonsense. Every other stove maker says cast iron is fine on induction.) Even if you have the old Lodge pans with the rough casting ring on the bottom, they'll work fine. If scratching worries you, lay down a paper towel or piece of parchment paper (some people even use silicon baking mats). As long as your pan heat stays below 450 F, they'll be fine. If you are going over that heat level, you won't be shuffling that heavy cast iron pan around and doing saute-flips, anyway. Other induction stove extras include greater power from the burnerss and better low heat functioning, besides the and very quick adjustability that everybody mentions above. Adjustibility does not apply to heavy cast iron, of coruse. (We like cast iron because it is so stable which more or less makes it the anthesis of adjustable). Induction can be pretty amazing with other kinds of magnetic cookware. Consider also that induction stoves can give you substantially more heat and more even heat than a coil burner and that may or may not be useful to you. AFAIK, the biggest coil burners are 8-inchers rated at 2500 KwH (figuring 70% to 75% efficiency in delivering that energy to the pan) while big induction burners can be 11" in diameter and run 3400 KwH of heat (at 84% efficiency). An example of what this means in practical terms is that you can bring a large canning kettle to boil much faster on induction than on a coil burner. It also means that you can simmer that large kettle of apple butter with heat evenly across the bottom or slowly cook down stock in a large pot without fear of bring the center. Also consider the ovens in the stoves. AFAIK, there is only one coil burner model (a Kenmore) which has a convection fan. The others are basic electric ovens. With induction stoves you get convection functions including third element convection heating (e so-called Eurpoean or "true" convection.) Some poeple really like convection and others are indifferent to it. So, maybe these things will matter to you and maybe they will not.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from my earlier post, I don't think you should discount soapstone at all--I would use it again in the right setting. I just wouldn't use *our* particular soapstone. We didn't get samples and test, and we should have (it was at the top of our budget so we just went with the cheapest stone they had--mistake!) I remember someone here, Marcolo I think, getting samples a few months after ours went in and commenting that our stone looked like Ray Liotta after the testing. ;) But I do still love it for the reasons we chose it, so I would look for a harder soapstone that had those great qualities with fewer of the downsides. All soapstone will show some wear, but usually it's more like a patina, and many can be oiled or sanded to hide this if you want. I don't think most people have the issue with the edges gouging and breaking down like we do. A few random thoughts, too--our sink cabinet was much the same as yours. In our before pics you can see one door completely missing--it wouldn't close so we finally just took it off! Our sink run had been built in a later remodel (using, we think, parts of the original cabinets) because the original sinks of that era were freestanding behemoths (beautiful, but rarely kept in remodels in the 30s-50s sadly) so it was common for those cabinets to be remodeled even if others were kept. Ours were very poor condition (only mediocre quality to start, and many years old with water leaks and such to boot) and could not be salvaged. They were also three-sided built-in-place (very common in that era) which limited how easily we could reuse or adapt them. And I love love love tile counters, but we got it priced out and it was well above the cost of any stone options to have it done well (critical for it to be level--while we were fine doing our backsplash ourselves, we were not confident in our ability to get a perfectly level surface on the counter) using epoxy grout (which local places said was the solution to icky grout, something we wanted to avoid--dunno what the thinking on this is these days, as this was three years ago). If you have strong DIY tile skills, maybe an option, but otherwise, it's probably not worth the cost. And last (sorry for the length!) two thoughts on drawers: yes, they can add runners if you want (may need to replace the boxes though depending on drawers), but beeswax did wonders for ours! Try that first for sure. We did find that it was less costly to remodel the areas where we did not open walls beyond electrical, so I think if you can divide the kitchen by walls, it would be feasible to keep the Hoosier and drawers but gut the other areas. However, we also had and were keeping plaster walls--drywall is a lot cheaper so then it might make more sense to go down to the studs and just put up new wall. It may also affect code requirements, too. Where we did not open walls, our existing wiring was grandfathered in (except for counters, since cabinets/counters were new). That did save us some money too.

Yes, DH and I am making our cabinets. It has ended up being way more work than I expected (but doesn't every project end up like that?). I'm considering putting glass doors for my dish cabinet - but I found a look where they used fancier routered edges on the shelves so when the doors are closed it sort of looks like mullions, but is not. The top section does have mullions, our ceilings are not tall enough to get that look. This was my inspirational picture - but unfortunately what I'm ended up with has strayed quite a bit from this. Here is a link that might be useful: Crown Point Victorian Cabinets