I really have to say I feel for every post I have read. Although Vancouver BC has a lot going for it in theory, it's landlords are not one of it's perks. Take M Block Holdings...seems like a nice little company until you realize the M is Ms. Milos. Now I will set the stage by saying...my fiancee and I are weirdos. Really. 6'5", pink mohawk, don't shave as much as I should, housewife (by choice!! and a good one!!) and my girl is a little bit technicoloured also. That said my idea of fun is playing classical guitar and meditating and my fiancee paints and designs clothing. So we never had a neighbor complain, never made a lot of noise, we aren't tidy people but we are clean...So things started falling a part 3-4 months into a 12mo lease when she would do stuff like... 1 - Her unlocking our door and barging into our apartment while we were "in bed" (and not asleep). 2 - Her screaming at us from the parking lot to come down stairs and talk to her...and when we did she accused of doing drugs because someone in the building was smoking pot. Neither of us do drugs, and we barely ever drink. She assumed it was us because my winter, indoor garden got supplemental florescent light. (Come on who smokes tomatoes?) 3 - Someone broke into our mailbox - she tried to bill us for the new lock saying we had broke into it ourselves. Because I guess we were too stoned to use our key? I still don't get this one... So we move out, 2 months notice instead of the normal 1 required by the lease... What happens? She misses not 1 but 2 walk throughs... She breaks into the apartment and gets very upset that she had to mop up the spilled water...(we left a full bucket of water right where the door would hit it for exactly this reason...if it spilled we knew she had broken in) Writes a bad check to return our damage deposit. The bank manager at our bank even stamped it as a bad check because she had used white out, wrote 2 different amounts on it...etc. When we went to get a new check she started calling us racists and screaming obscenities at us. Accused us of being white supremists and hating immigrants...( for the record I am white, my fiancee is Haida(Native), and I am a recent immigrant to Canada...so....) Now we live downtown in a great little place with a great landlord, of course our neighbour (who has a different landlord) is a wanna be Gangsta-with-subwoofer so...sometimes it seems you can't win!!

bedelia - I'm the same way - wanting it to look perfect. But you're looking at it from a distance of a foot or just slightly more so you're going to see all the tiniest flaws. Stand back or walk by it from a distance most other people will use and it's a whole different view. There have been times when I was really dissatisfied with part of a well or trim that I couldn't get quite right, but after a few weeks I've forgotten all about it and can't even recall where the problem was. Same with sewing projects. Sometimes you're stuck with trying to fix the mistakes made by someone before you and that's not always possible. If you've got a lousy drywall job or an older house like mine where settling has occurred over time and the drywall becomes uneven in places - what can you do? I've actually gotten less obsessed as I've gotten older because my eyesight is such that I can't see close up well anymore. That's usually a curse, but in the case of a perfectionist painter - it's a blessing - LOL.

If the drawer hardware is good you can likely get away with just one pull. Live with it awhile and see how hard the drawers are to open and close. If you find the drawers to hard to open and close after they are loaded up, you can try better drawer hardware if you have decided the appearance is acceptable with a single pull. Older houses often had no real drawer hardware, just wooden drawers on wooden rails. Large drawers often needed two pulls to even get them open.

If you plan to do a tiled backsplash (BS), I would not put in a 6" granite BS as well. My personal opinion is that a tile + granite BS doesn't look "right" on the same wall. It should be one or the other. I can possibly see the granite on the raised counter behind the sink and tile on the range wall, but not both on the same wall. Have you considered making your peninsula all one level rather than two levels? One level would give you the advantage of a large workspace for projects (baking, school, crafts, wrapping gifts, etc.). In my experience, a raised bar does little to hide a mess at the sink since the mess is quite visible to anyone standing or walking by and it's "in the face" of someone sitting at the counter, regardless of height. Now, unsolicited advice, I know, but.... I would consider moving the refrigerator to the left of the current range to get it out of the main part of the kitchen so snackers and other outsiders can access it w/o interfering with or getting underfoot of someone working in the kitchen. I would then move the range + surrounding cabinets down. This will not only keep the refrigerator from being deep inside the kitchen, but it will also provide some measure of protection to the Cooking Zone...unless there's a doorway on that back wall that I cannot see. Leading to the question...what is b/w the refrigerator & sink cabinet run? Doorway? Blank wall? If a blank wall, I would consider moving the sink to the current blank wall (w/a deep sink), turning the corner and placing a 12" or 18" cabinet on the peninsula, and then the DW. This would free up your peninsula giving you a nice work surface for those crafts I mentioned above as well as giving your kitchen a more open feel. A deep sink on the back wall will also do a better job of "hiding" dirty dishes. All this depends on kitchen measurements and the presence/absence of a doorway on the unseen wall.