Your property taxes should not be affected by a new roof, with or without skylights, as the county will not reassess the value of your home based on that one improvement. You already have a roof, and the new one is just replacing the existing one, not adding something you didn't have before. There is no added value in a replacement roof, and although it can boost what is called the "effective age" of your home---that is rarely enough by itself to change the assessed value of your house. I would say your contractor's reluctance to install the skylights indicates he doesn't have much experience with them. Ask him for references of people for whom he has installed skylights before using him, and go see the finished jobs if possible. You may want a different roofing contractor.

Frankly I'm no fan of a U shaped kitchen because two corners are one extra useless corner. Working off of Mama's excellent plan, I turned it into an L shape. 1. I moved the fridge to the opposite side. The reason I did so is your mudroom and your pantry are on that side. Coming in with groceries would mean lots of steps back and forth to put foodstuff away if your fridge is so far from the pantry. The same holds true when grabbing food to make a meal. Great exercise but really do you want to walk across your kitchen to get stuff from the pantry and then back again across the kitchen to get stuff from your fridge? 2. I moved the microwave shelf to that side too. I did it since it's closer to the fridge and it's out of the cooking zone. 3. I widened your island. 4. I added a 42" dish drawer facing your dishwasher so it's easy unloading to your dish drawer. 5. I moved the trash drawers to next to the prep sink. You didn't mention if you plan on having a disposal unit in your sink? I have a prep sink and a cleanup sink and put a disposal unit in both. They're not too expensive and I felt it was well worth it. I'm also planning on putting a small trash can UNDER my clean up sink. Most trash is generated by the prep area, so the trash under the clean up sink is only for the occasional food stuff that can't go down the disposal. 6. Next to your air return, I added narrow shelving. This can be open or closed and is good for storing stuff one can deep, so would be good for stuff you use more frequently like cereals, etc. One other thing I noticed not related to your kitchen but your pantry/powder room. You don't want the door to your powder room opening into the powder room because think of how you will need to be a contortionist to try and get around the door to use the toilet. Get a pocket door or have the door swing out. Additionally I would not angle the corner where the sink is in there as it will feel quite congested as it's a small room already. The space out of the pantry is minimal but will make the powder room feel larger.

A skylight will only provide light during the day , they cost quite a lot to have installed properly . I would add better overall lighting , what you have now sucks get some pots with LEDS not warm but in the 5000 range . A counter depth fridge will make the space feel more open. I would have glass door cabinets for the uppers with lighting inside too

Thank you all for the comments. Sorry for the delay in responding, but I've been a bit out of touch. I did end up going with the larger tiles and it turned out great. Thanks for your concerns regarding the color, but my wife and I had previously looked at different colors and decided we did still prefer the gray to anything else we looked at. She was very surprised and loves it. Thanks again!