Thank you very much for thinking of us and posting pictures of your mom's beautiful dining room, mojomom. I certainly hope that the choices we make for our home will age as gracefully as your mom's. : ) Thanks for the pictures mdln. Those are very nice. Awww, no worries sheesh. This technological stuff is so hard to keep up with, isn't it. Our video screen for watching movies is hooked up to a speaker cabinet from 1978 (the record player is even still in it) because neither dh nor I are up to figuring out the new sound systems right now, LOL. We'll leave out the electric fireplace, jlc712. In fact, we've had an about face with the whole project...Now why I didn't do this earlier, I don't know. I drew everything out on graph paper (always better than doing math in your head-oy!), and with the other furniture in the dining room, I was stunned (smacking forehead, here) that there really is only room for an 8' table. Ummmm...we're outgrowing our 8' table already, and 1/2 of our kids are under 10. That lead to a whole house evaluation, and a complete rearrangement of furniture and room functions. As a result, we flip-flopped our living room and dining room today. (Fortunately, the kitchen is smack dab in the middle of the house with the other rooms on either side of it.) The living room (I mean...new dining room) is 15.5' x 25'. It can handle a dining room table, a big dining room table. Like 16' long big. And that's with putting a closet at one end of the room (so all these closet ideas? They won't be wasted!) For DH, this means doing the longer, more extensive project of supporting the ceiling with beams rather than a closet, but it will make for a wide open and airy living room(yay, I love airy!), and a long dining room with plenty of room for a larger table. Phew. Since we often have large groups of people over, this should work very well for us. We were even able to work it so that we got more couch and chair seating in the 14'7" x 17' room than we could logistically work in the 15.5' x 25' room. It all seems good. It is so true that it pays to live in a house for awhile to see how the space functions before making major changes. Thank you one and all for helping us think this project through. You have been incredibly kind and helpful and I love the creative insights and ideas that you brought forth.

"Question: will support post on each end of the 10ft overhang be enough or do i need another post in center??" No and no. You can't do it like that. You could have your fabricator cut slots into the bottom of the stone and fill the slots with stainless steel or composite rods set in a bed of epoxy or acrylic adhesive designed for rodding. 30" long at a minimum and spaced every 16" or so. Alternatively, you could run a 2" steel square tube between the three posts and set the stone on that. Painted flat black and set in 3" or so, it will be somewha inconspicuous. Check your door swings first, please.

Our house is 20 years old and had 6" pots throughout the kitchen, adjoining family room and hallway and I hated the look of the PAR bulbs and they needed changing constantly . Too expensive to change them all so we used a Hubbell retro kit that just clipped in and replaced the old bulbs with a complete trim and light kit when they first became available in LED with 4000k and made them more flush with the ceiling. After 10 years we just updated the LED's with a more subdued trim kit as we renovate the room with another quick fit kit but this time the kit is controllable via blue tooth and the colour temperature on each light (or groups) can be changed so I can vary from 5000K to 2500K if I want a more relaxed scene before bedtime. We have an iPad that stays in the room and controls our fireplace, Sonos, Ring and now our lighting. Lights can be turned off and on and dimmed using the wall switch or the app if I want to change the colour of the light and I can do it all from the couch (especially great for napping when I'm too lazy to get up and turn the lights off on the wall switch). They were cheap ($35) and may not last 10 years but I love the flexibility and I love grouping my lights to change a whole room at once. It's not the fanciest trim but I find it blends as well as the new pots we put in the bedroom. These ones were by Commercial Electric from Home Depot - a budget retrofit for those that don't want to rip out the old 6" or 4" cans and so easy to do yourself. Here is the link https://www.homedepot.ca/product/commercial-electric-5-inch-6-inch-bluetooth-led-recessed-downlight-trim-21-colour-options-670-lumens-dimmable/1001200601. We have a mix of 4" and 6" in our house. I like the 4" in the bedroom and master bath. I like the wider beam spread we get from the 6" in the kitchen. I love that these kits don't leave us stuck with one colour temperature that comes with an integrated bulb. Lots of options out there so you can change your look pretty easily.

cpartist give excellent suggestions for how to deal with 10 foot tall kitchens, keeping the ambiance Craftsman and attractive. I will note I find 9 foot tall ceilings plenty fine for me, but go with feels comfortable to you. Although I do have a cathedral ceiling in the public part of the house.... (No, my house is not Craftsman). As someone else noted, you'll have to change your door heights and other aspects of your home to go with the increase in ceiling height - and that's not going to be cheap. Even at six foot one, I don't feel cramped in homes that have 8 foot ceilings - I was just in one (probably built in the 60s or 70s) this past Sunday (after months of not being to get out and visit folk very often at all). It was fine. But 9 doesn't affect pricing as much as 10 feet would. Please don't do without upper cabinets. You'll hurt resale, as not everyone is going to want to stop everything and remodel as soon as they move in. Even though I mostly have drawers, the lowest one is always a pain to access anyway..