Hey, thanks! I do love reading blogs. Strange how I find them and don't know the person and never will but become a lurker to their life. Hey, people are interesting, what can I say? My brilliant chess-savant cousin has the scariest ditto-head blog around but I can't post it 'cos he tracks that and busted me once before: "Was your Indian grandfather a carpenter?" "How did you know THAT?!" ;0) If you're reading this, Matt, I love you you crazy dude! Facebook has some crazy hilarious Oxford group blogs - and Uni reject blogs! - that are irreverent and thigh-slapping. Unfortunately, Facebook's setup means you can only see your own network's blogs, and that is very limiting. Oh, well, that's what cut-and-paste and e-mail are for ;]

I went back and forth with deciding on a walk out or not. I think the same way you do, I don't really like the look of a two story home on the backside. That being said, I really wanted big daylight windows in the basement. We went with large windows, but no walk out. We would have had to bring the grade up a bit more for a walk out and as it is, we will have to put in two retaining walls. I am not sure how much more expensive it was with the large windows, but I am sure it was more than smaller windows and the extra expense of the excavation. I thought about what we would be walking out to and that is a woodsy area on our 7 acres. It is nothing special and since most of our living space on the property is on the other side, it didn't seem to make sense to put the walk out in. We do have the large, two story look on the back side, but we have made that look shorter by siding choices. We put a cedar shake on the top section, then followed with straight siding. You can see photos of it here. Good luck with your decision. It is one of many you will be going through. Here is a link that might be useful: My house building blog

So you 1:1s don't bother flanking? (I've always heard the rule that if the hanging & the furniture it's over are the same width, you flank the furniture with chairs/lamp/whatever so that it's visually larger than the hanging). Hmm.... BTW normally I do picture overload, but I started the thread away from home, then came home to a dead camera battery. I'll see what I can do with my cell...

As for your specific questions: i) I would center the cook top. That is basically where you want it to be for functional reasons anyway, and you'll be able to see that wall very well when you are approaching the kitchen. You will have a good vantage for seeing the symmetry, and it will look nice. (As opposed to centering something that you will never be able to see head-on, so who cares if it's centered.) Also, your stove when centered definitely isn't too far from the sink. Actually, doing that gives you an almost perfect amount of counter between the two to really have space to get some work done, but still be able to dump a pot of boiling water in the sink without having to walk too far. ii) I think you could do a combination of butcher block and soapstone quite easily by having the peninsula be butcher block. It is handy to the sink, so it'd be a great prep area. Like this: Here is a link to more photos of that finished kitchen: http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2550583/bricktons-finished-kitchen If you were doing an induction range (instead of just an induction cooktop), I could also see doing everything in soapstone except doing butcher block on just that section of counter between the range and the fridge wall. Here is a new layout with all my suggestions incorporated. I also made the fridge wall cabinets a bit deeper (even counter depth fridge are not 24"). And I deepened the peninsula so you can have standard 24" cabinets under it and still have a 12" overhang, plus you have plenty of space to make that counter deeper, and a that is just more great work space, so why not?