Sue, the Etap hotel is a few steps below a motel 6...quite a few steps in fact. LOL! The rooms were tiny, which were expected but the floor was really grungy and the toilet/shower area were a one piece porta potty plastic unit that had been put into a corner of the room. It was very small and the floor area by the toilet got soaked when you showered. The shower stall area was barely big enough to turn around in. Now I wish I had taken a picture! Patti, I think the house I used to live in was torn down and a new one put in it's place, there were a lot of new homes there. The town was very small, just one street with one tiny restaurant and a coffin maker. That was it...not even a post office. Stacy, yeah, I think I should've learned after our trip out west. Some of it was fun but for the most part they weren't interested in a lot of it. I've downloaded my pictures and will start posting them. Wish I had taken more videos, they are pretty funny because they are so BAD! LOL!

groveraxle, Thanks for the photoshops. That actually has me back to considering the light grey concrete one the most as it seems to match the overall asthetic better than others I am considering. May not be as thin as what I would prefer but the singlular central base feels like a good compromise.

I like the round one, Shea, and that last one, too. Patricia detests decorative mirrors, and posts the same mirror mantra on every thread, don’t worry about it. ;) She has no idea what’s it’s reflecting and never elaborates on what should be ”reflected twice”. Maybe it’s for checking your appearance on the way out, maybe for reflecting light, maybe for dimension, maybe because you just like it. Lots of reasons mirrors are a good and useful design element. One static picture does not tell the story of a room. Things change as you move around.

It looks like from your photo that the distance from the cooktop to the bottom of the hood is 30-1/4". That is where it should be. The range of distance from cooktop to the bottom of the hood is 30-36", but with an island hood, it should be closer to the 30" side. That is because with an island hood there is more opportunity for the effluent to escape, since there are no adjacent cabinets to help corral it. You don't want to have spent, as you said, $4k, on the hood only to have it mounted too high to capture anything, and it is ineffective at the higher height so that the smells and grease go all over the place. After a short time, you will no longer bump your head. The brain "learns" where the hood is, and you will automatically make allowance for it. In restaurants there are people of all heights cooking, and they are usually frantically running back and forth, and they still don't bump their heads on the hoods. I think @User once posted a photo of an extremely tall restaurant chef at the cooktop with a commercial hood, and obviously it was fine.