Love the photos and suggestions! Littlesmokie, I haven't read that book. I'll look for it in the library. I'm heading back to the F&B paint store tomorrow with my tile samples. I went to the store that carries FPE and just got completely overwhelmed. I can't make rhyme nor reason out of their system. I don't understand why they don't offer a deck of their sample colors. Pinch Me, though I love P&L tiles, their website is almost completely useless. My husband found the P&L catalogue online at http://digitallibrary.interiordesign.net/doc/Library/Pratt-_-Larson-Ceramics/2009063001/ which is so much more helpful. Their Victorian glazed tiles are even more delicious in person. The crackle and glazes and colors. Gorgeous! If anyone's interested in the funky green tiles I'm using, they're P&L R-gloss tiles, colors R-135, R-136, and #-137. If you want to go darker, R-108 is a deeper version of 137. For my counters, I hope to use soapstone. I think I can swing that in the budget. If not, I'll go with butcher block counters. Here is a link that might be useful: Online Pratt & Larson catalogue

White paint cleans as easily as blue paint. The thing I'd be concerned about with active kids is scratching/chipping/denting. A good quality cabinet paint job should be pretty durable--it's just damage to the finish is more likely than staining, though some 3-year-olds do seem to be experts in the impossible. Whether you get painted or stained, either way, have some touch up paint or stain to mend the booboos with. The real alternatives are things like metal cabinets. I don't know if they're period appropriate to the build date of your house, but they've been around for a very long time. If you get them with color they're probably either powder coated enamel or lacquered. Viking bought out one of the top lines of metal cabinets. There are some others on the market as well. Oh! Or laminate. I've seen some really funky, wonderful laminate cabinets that were done artistically, rather than cheaply. Laminate is plastic, and therefore hard to destroy.

Maybe you could try some of the ivory granites such as ivory silk, the lightest giallo ornamental, colonial cream or colonial gold some of those and many more. If you have a section you want to do in a different contrasting stone you could do your darker granite. I have cream cabinets in my master bath, I really wanted them to be whiter as I had already picked out the stone a dark one and it was being cut. When it was installed it just lacks that snap I was looking for. It sort of just misses with the color of the cabinets being a strange off white color that I can't describe. It doesn't look good. I'm sick about it. I would have been better off doing a stone that blended with it and it would have had a rich appearance instead of the sickly look it has now. I could cry....every time I look at it. I messed up big time!!! YMMV

I think it is regional. On Gardenweb, white is very popular. In the suburbs here, distinct off-white and glazes are popular. In the city, dark stains, very dark brown, maroonish, black. Talk to a realtor, and also look at a lot of real estate online, particularly at new construction, houses that say "recently renovated", and houses that look heavily staged.