susanelewis- I am a scrooge when it comes to buying items for my home, but I also insist on quality. I have two of the Totos you're considering, and consider them to be a fair price for what you get. In the four years they've been installed, they have always flushed properly the first time and have never plugged up. After having bought and installed probably ten different toilets over the years in my various homes, I'm sticking with Toto. They are somewhat more expensive than what you can buy at Home Depot, but I put a great value in retiring my plunger, and never having anyone, including guests, have to ask me to unclog the toilet.

I have the Toto Drake w/ soft close lid. The seat stays up just fine. The "lid" slowly closes if you start closing it a bit. If you don't start pushing the lid downward, it also will stay up just fine. Maybe yours is defective, unless Toto makes more than one type of soft close. BTW, I've had mine about 11 months and have experienced no problems.

What I don't like about the soft close mechanism is the weird little scootch it makes when pulling in that last small distance. It's has a revolting, horror-movie quality for me, like the receding tongue of a nightmare-animal. (I can hardly write about it w/o shivering - an overeager cab salesperson wanting to demonstrate them can send me practically running out of the showroom!) But aside from that sick-making movement, it seems to me, to be the almost perfect representation of the sheer laziness of the world we live in now. How much effort does it really take to close your own drawers correctly (and quietly)? Is everyone's life so raddled by stress or desperate haste that they can't restrain themselves from slapping the drawers back? And it also fails my standard of desirable simpleness. I agree that they are appealing to the gadget-minded - when we first saw them in a kitchen showroom, my DH could hardly wait to disembowel a drawer assembly to figure it out. But I'll keep closing the drawers in our house, by hand, thank you. (I have no idea what a soft-close toilet is and, may it please the Gods, I'll never encounter one.) This is the one thing I don't want to upgrade to. If only I could acquire a similar, visceral, distaste for Marmoleum, high CFM vent fans, and expensive English faucets; my kitchen reno budget would be much less strained. L

OP - You should change the title of this thread because you are receiving responses based on paying $6000 ONLY for soft close whereas the $6000 is for a number of different upgrades. The Level 2 cabinets seem to be constructed far better than Level One and IMO superior drawer construction is worth $6000 along with full extension under mount drawers and probably a style that is more pleasing to me. Of course the builder is making a huge profit on it but that's not the issue. You are a captive audience and cabinets are (at least to me) part of the actual construction of the home. The builder is providing the least expensive crap cabinets baked into the "price" of the home and then profiting because people are going to want or in the case of well constructed cabinetry need to upgrade. What are the upgrades for cabinets at each level because those are a lot of upgrades. I wouldn't stint on items that provide increased function and increased duration. However I wouldn't pay for upgrades that are easy to change down the road - counters; flooring choices, faucets etc.