lblue, sorry I didn't check in at all yesterday, then tried to post a reply but it didn't go through. Sorry, I am just now getting what you are asking! I was assuming that by rails you meant the vertical part of the frame that affects the overall width. The frame is 2" on either side. What you are calling the rail is 2.25" on either side. The panels on the doors are 7", for a total width of 11.5" on each door, and 25" for the entire cabinet including frame. (I only counted the left side, since on the drawings the right rail is considered part of the next cabinet.) Am I now understanding you correctly? If you can get your frames down to 1.5", you will have more width for the panels. FWIW, I like the way it looks. In fact, the next cabinet over, the tall one to the counter, has 10.5" doors and I like the way that one looks too. They don't look too skinny to my eye.

So, your aisles would be 37" once you factor in the overhand on the counter (40 - 1.5 - 1.5 = 37") In our house, we have to go with 36" aisles because an island is essential to making my kitchen work for me. I am the only cook and practically the only person in the kitchen (my DH will come in to grab a snack our something to drink from the fridge, but the kitchen is mostly my domain.) If I could go wider on the aisles, I absolutely would, but to do that, we would have to take down a load-bearing wall. In regard to my findings when I headed to IKEA, 42" was comfortable for me. If working with a two-cook kitchen, I would possibly go wider still. One of the reasons that double islands receive criticism is that they create additional barriers for getting from one area to another. You'll find most people on GW are very oriented toward *flow* of a kitchen, workspaces, and how it works for what you are doing. What you mentioned as a scenario with your DH doing prep may help others offer suggestions as to how to get that situation to work, maybe with or maybe without a double island. But, you are at a wonderful point of planning where you CAN make changes without the challenges/limitations that those of us who are remodeling face. You are so fortunate to land here at this stage of the process. :) I'm rather new here, but without fail, I have seen advice on this forum that has been helpful in making decisions. For me, I'm not following everything that has been suggested (for example, I will have a barrier [i.e. island] between my cooktop and my oven and someone suggested that I do a range rather than separate...I wish to have the oven situated a little higher than it sits when part of a range, so I am opting to keep them separate), BUT with the help of people here, it has made me look at everything I assumed that I knew about cooking in a kitchen and what I need to make it function well for me. I strongly encourage you to begin to think about where your items will have homes once to start to get your layout together. There are some excellent posts on here that will help you with that. I wound up getting my layout mostly how I thought I wanted it, and then I found that I needed to change a few drawers to have items where they would make the most sense. I narrowed a drawer bank and added a narrow, tall cabinet where I didn't have one before for items to have a home. You'll be happy that you thought of where things are going to live in the kitchen before you have the cabinets because then you have the opportunity to have exactly what you need. In regard to traffic pattern concerns, people aren't just talking about where other people may be walking, but also where you are walking while you are using your kitchen. I can't say that you'll wind up with a kitchen without ANY regrets/wish-I-would-have-done-differently, but with the help you receive here, you will find that your kitchen is likely to be better for working in it than what you originally planned.

Spider, I am sorry about sending you on a wild goose chase. You can't rely on internet for everything. This will drive you crazy. You have to make a decision and move on. You can only get a limited amount of data about anything in life. You have to find a nice balance between trusting the people you hire, your instinct and looking for experts in a particular field. Internet does not give you "expertise". It gives you a culmination of anecdotal experience. Expertise is arrived at having done things multiple times. An average home owner does not build house or remodel kitchen enough times to become an expert. They can, however, have strong opininos. Sorting out strong opinions from expertise is quite difficult. The people who can make complex decisions well intuitively or learn to do this well are the people who make best decisions in the long run. This is what people do in business, government, medicine etc. etc. You are just using different set of information but still using good decision making techinique..... I think you really need to go and look at these products. When you say Pella, they make several different kinds of windows. Go look at the particular window spec'ed out for the house and see if you like them. Go look at the houses that have these windows. If they are within the price point of where you need to be and you like the way look, AND your builder has had good experience with them, then you are done and you need to move on. The key is that your particular builder has had "good past experience". Even so, there are things that can happen out of your/his control. There may be a delay in production, the quality of windows have gone down in a few months, they have had a fire in the plant etc. You just make the best decision that you can make and move on! There WILL ALWAYS be people who will have problems with any product if they are installed wrong or picked wrong for wrong reasons. You can't find any product that do not have any bad ratings. This is NOT possible. This is where having a GOOD interior designer/architect can really help you. They know what type of product categories need to go together at a particular price range. They will narrow the range down for you to pick from. For example, at a certain price range, putting in old growth reclaimed wood floors would not be possible even if you "saved" from someplace else. At another price range of house, this is demanded.... (A friend of ours built a house using old growth trees that "fell" in old growth forests of BC that were shipped to California to build their vacation home. They were in stratosphere of budget category...) I am coming up with an outrageous example, but this is why having a price range is really helpful for the people working with/for you.... i wish you the best.....

"...this thread is 3 years old..." "And your point is what?" The point is that we don't resurrect old threads unless it's an update to the originating post. When a thread is this old, it's doubtful the originator will be back since most people disappear after completing their Kitchen. A few will come back, but it's by far the exception rather than the rule. Just resurrecting to say an old thread is "useful" forces threads off the first page that need help TODAY/NOW, not years ago. If you find the thread useful, great! Read it and move on. Others will find it as well just like you did without it being bumped up to the first page. In all honestly, most of us have started to ignore bumped up threads, in part b/c we've had a lot of Houzz Pros bump old threads with replies of marginal (if any) value just so they can draw attention to themselves. We've also noticed non-pros posting similarly -- so we ignore them. (I opened this one accidentally - I didn't check the start date first or I would have ignored it as well.) If you have a question that's not answered by this or any other thread, then it's really best to start your own thread with an informational Subject/Title. You will not only get more replies, but replies relevant to your question.