IMO you have to have the right style house for beadboard ceilings to succeed - you can't just chuck them up anywhere with any ol' kind of decor and architecture. Ditto for coffered ceilings, IMO. 3-dimensional ceiling treatments are tricky. (I've finally got DH really sold on tin ceilings for this house - steered him past a display of it at the home center and subtly made him think it was his idea LOL - but it'll have to wait until we find out if the downstairs ceilings have to come down to fix the "trampoline floors" upstairs. Bleh.) As long as it's never been painted, removing popcorn ceiling material is easy, if messy, so doing that part yourselves could save you some real money. Demo work always costs more than it seems like it ought to and it can be awfully therapeutic. ;-) Remove all the furniture from the room, cover the floors with waterproof disposable tarps (run them up the wall several inches and use wide painter's tape to secure them so water won't run under the baseboard, and tape the tarps together too) and turn the electricity off to the room and remove or cover light fixtures. If you have nice wallpaper or easily-damaged paint on the walls, tape plastic over the walls too. Even though it looks idiotic put on a shower cap, trust me on that, and oversized safety glasses. Get yourself a garden sprayer - the kind with the hose and canister - fill it with warm water, and wet the popcorn stuff down. Let it sit for a few minutes. Chances are some of it will start splatting on the floor all by itself but scrape gently at it with a wide scraper. You can even get scrapers that will screw onto a threaded wooden pole (like old-fashioned broomsticks), they're in the paint department at Lowes/HD, so you don't have to teeter on a stepstool or ladder. You may need to wet stubborn areas down more but you don't want to saturate the drywall. You may not be able to get every trace off but once the ceiling dries you can go over it quickly with a sanding screen on a pole sander and knock off any stubborn bits. Roll/fold up the tarp with the popcorn glop still on it for disposal; if there's a lot of water and you have a shop-vac available, by all means use that to suck up as much of the water as you can. All the supplies together would cost less than $100, maybe $150 if you needed a LOT of plastic (that's not counting a shop-vac, but that's not mandatory, and you might be able to mooch one off your contractor friend), once you get the hang of it it goes fast, and your contractor will have a nice clean surface all ready for skimcoating. If you're up to painting you could just have the contractor do the actual drywall-finishing work, saving you even more money. IMO if you put up beadboard or something on the ceiling I do think it would be best to remove the popcorn anyway in order to have a smooth surface to work with, but you can do a bit more mickey-mouse job of it. ;-) I think 8 foot ceilings are wonderful... my previous house had 7 foot ceilings (and slanted ones upstairs that went down to 3 feet high). In this house I'm blessed by ceilings a little over 8 1/2 feet (depending on where you measure LOL) downstairs and upstairs again those angled ones that go from 8 feet to 4 feet.

We are currently building, and we did 6'8" doors on our lower level, which has 10' ceilings. The exterior doors have transoms, which are at a consistent header height with all the windows. We toured MANY homes when we were researching plans and preparing to build. I just couldn't get used to 8' doors. They just didn't look right to me. To each their own I guess!

Your cabinets are quite warm in tone. I worry that a "cement gray" wood is going to clash with the kitchen elements. You've already stated that the original hardwoods have faded. You MUST expect the same to happen to the next wood floor you install. This fading tells me the windows do NOT have the UV blocking protection needed to prevent the fading. So... you may want to pick a floor that looks good as-is as well as what it will fade to over time. Sadly (in my case) the gray will stay true to colour much longer than any other of your choices. The mid-tone brown will probably lose as much as half it's colour. The SUPER DARK floors (ebony, etc) will maintain most of their colour as well. For these reasons, I would highly recommend a natural colour (no stain) white oak or even European Oak (which will turn silvery-gray over time) over any of your choices. Your windows will give you headaches with mid-tone stains. Only SUPER LIGHT (like the gray) or SUPER DARK (like ebony) will maintain their colours. That's quite limiting. So the suggestion for a natural finish (I would stay away from maple as it turns a STRONG margarine-yellow) is a great one. If you want a floor that is more modern, then have a look at European Oak (it naturally turns silver-gray when exposed to sunlight). It is the SUPER START of hardwoods right now.

What are the floors in the rest of the house? IMO if they are wood then the same floor in the kitchen . There are so many issues when doing a kitchen and it is not decided as a seperate entity it needs to flow with the rest of the house . Lighting is IMO the first thing to address lots of 4” LED pot lights in 4000K range will help a lot in choosing colors . The floor colo to hide dog hair depends on the color of your dog and I am kidding. Get a swiffer that is the best way to hide dog hair. I never like maple stained cabinets the maple rarely takes a stain perfectly and if you are already worried about light those dark cabinets will gobble light like crazy The lanterns above the island in your drawing are Edison bulbs and will cast a yellow light all over everything and provide no proper lighting at all. You don’t seem to have an idea of the whole space yet and until you do I would suggest not making any choices, better yey ge a KD before you live to regret an expensive undertaking.