I have a FD CD SS GE & I love it. It keeps my food fresh longer than my old frig did.

"Does anyone have a seam on their island and does it distract the eye?" It depends on the "quality" of the seam. Is the seam material a good color match for the counter? Are the edges on each slab at the seam clean/sharp and smooth? Are the slabs the same thickness? This should be no problem b/c C-Stone is an engineered product and production quality controls should demand this. Is the seam tight and very thin? If the counter material has a pattern (regular or not), did the fabricators and installers do a good job at "matching" the two slabs? (Yours does not appear to have a visible pattern to worry about.) If all the above are done properly, the seam should be almost invisible. Regarding using a single slab - if you reduce the depth of your island, you should be able to use a single slab. 1.5" counter overhang + 24" cabinet + 12" cabinet + 1" door + 15" overhang = 53.5" (15", btw, is the minimum overhang recommended for counter-height seating.) This gives you full 24" deep cabinets in the front of the island plus 12" deep cabinets behind the island for seldom-used items. Caesarstone slabs are 120 inches (3.10m) long x 56ý inches (1.44m) wide By reducing your island depth to 53.5", you should be able to use just one slab - no seam! Is that your main/cleanup sink in the island? I'm asking b/c it has very little landing or work space on the right - for me, that would not be acceptable, but perhaps you're OK with it...? IMO, I think you should have at least 24" on each side of a cleanup sink. If it's just a prep sink, then it's fine...ideally, I would aim for at least 9" to 12" on the non-working side of a prep sink, but if you can't fit it, then it will be fine. Good luck!

I think he means that if you don't put molding of some sort at the base of the cabs, there will be a gap between where the wood ends and the cabs begin as wood expands and contracts a little with the weather. Same where the floor meets the walls. I'm not sure what you mean by putting in new baseboards after.? Where we have the white baseboard along the walls, we could have quarter round instead, but it wouldn't be my first choice. If he's suggesting quarter round for those walls, I wouldn't let him do it as you'll just have to rip it up to put in proper baseboards. Also, look at this wall where baseboard and quarter round meet. The baseboard went in first and the quarter round is butted up to it. Doing it the quarter round first would have made the baseboard install unnecessarily tricky. Our floor guy didn't do either the baseboards or the quarter round. He did the floor and we did the trim. If you have a GC he could do the trim. You'll want cab trim that matches, so you may have to order it and that takes a while. And, yes, stained trim for the stained cabs and painted for the painted cabs. Baseboard is usually painted a trim color before installation, so that is a whole other job. We also did our floor after all the cabs were in. In our case it was because it turned out that the footprint of the old cabs was larger than the new ones, so we had a 1-2" gap between the flooring and the cabs - not a good look. It works. The other way would be easier, but hey, who needs easy?

It happens all the time. A homeowner will choose a tile or type of flooring and the installer will install it without thinking. Tile and flooring is not something that you can just throw down and make it work and come out even especially on a remodel. Here's why.. You start out with all of the subfloor heights even. You decide to install 1/2" thick wood flooring in all of the rooms but the kitchen. When new the builder compensated for the extra height when they tiled the kitchen. Say for example 1/4" thick tile was used. The builder would add 1/4" thick plywood to raise the floor to where the tile would be even with the wood flooring.. Fast forward.. You come along and decide to redo the kitchen floor with 1/2" tile that calls for a 1/4" underlayment. You now have 3/4" total height to deal with. The old 1/4" tile is removed. Minus 1/4 from 3/4 you have 1/2 left. !/2" will be the difference in height between the old and new. So now you have three choices. Go back and find a tile or flooring type with a thickness that will come out even when fully installed. Rip out all of the old wood flooring throughout the house and start over. Add a transition piece and learn to live with it. Myself I would have did a lot of measuring and after if you wanted to go with the tile you choose. Then I would have added something like a Shur-Trim transition piece under the tile and onto the wood flooring.