Thanks for the compliment shelayne. Sorry I didn't see your question until now. The floor was the original pine I found under the linoleum. I scraped it clean and always meant to tile. But, in the meantime, I just painted the floorboards a glossy black. It looked great right after cleaning, but it showed every bit of dirty and doggy footprints. People must have liked it though, because the house sold right away even though I never got around to tiling!

I just had to post here...OMG...the lady that wrote Laminate and luxurious in the same sentence.."NO". I hope I never have to meet someone like you in my lifetime. What a bunch of snobby, snarky..people! I am sorry..I think you can have a beautiful, luxurious kitchen without paying for granite, quartz, soapstone...etc. My goodness. I am building a house now and get to hear from our subs about all of the snooty women that they have to deal with...literally walking out of a house because the closets aren't big enough... What kind of country have we become? I say..if you want to buy high end appliances...beautiful cabinets..and put it all in a laminate kitchen. I think it can be stunning! Don't listen to all of these snooty fruities.....do what YOU want..and the people that matter...won't walk into your kitchen and take a mental note of your laminate..I would think it was beautiful! And for those of you who think that I must be some low life...my husband is a doctor! There....rant over! :-)

The lip should never be in front of the top cabinet rail. That will make the cabinets look like that top rail is short if you cover part of it. You always use build up with a built up counter. That goes for laminate, or any mitered stone counter. The buildup strips on top of the cabinet edges support the counter. Or, if you are having custom cabinets made, you can do an extra tall top rail to all of the cabinets so that looks even for all of the rails.

I am a laminate lover that now has granite in the kitchen. In the neighborhood we built in we had to choose granite or quartz (or marble or quartzite) to match the quality of the homes. We asked if we could downgrade to "fancy" laminate but they wouldn't let us. I wanted Formica 180FX in Travertine Silver. They did allow us to put it in our bathrooms and we love it. The reason why I love laminate is that it's quieter, not ice cold, and it really is extremely durable. We've never had a laminate counter get scratched, chipped or stained. I feel more comfortable with laminate because it's much cheaper than the granite & quartz patterns I like so if I were to ruin it or want a change after 10 years I wouldn't mind so much. We will never ever be replacing our granite unless the whole counter cracks in half, haha. It wasn't cheap and it's heavy and a pain to remove. I hope we like it forever! Quartz is great I've heard but it's not necessarily damage proof, it has its faults as well. One of my new neighbors (we both moved into our new homes 3 months ago) got quartz and it was installed with weird streaks and a few scratches on it that couldn't be removed by hand. The installer had to buff it out somehow. Another neighbor got a different quartz and I think it stained from some sort of kid's paint or maybe food. It's only 5 months old maybe. Hopefully the stain can be lifted. I loved only one quartz I looked at for my kitchen...I'm not a fan of the marble-look quartz nor do I like the speckled options or the ones with glass chunks/glitter and I think the reason why I didn't favor most of the quartz choices were that they didn't have the depth or glow of natural stone...they were just missing something. Some of the Cambria options looked like swirled melted plastic or crayons to me (one of the popular choices here on Houzz). The one I liked was from Caesarstone but when it came down to choosing we went with granite (I love discovering new details in it daily) partly because it was around $1,000 less and we had to budget for many upgrades and since I knew I would be happy with either counter I chose to save money. All counters have pros/cons but I consider laminate to be extremely durable.