If there's an old stove, you can try Reliance Appliance in Berkeley or Apple Appliance in Oakland if there aren't any South Bay places---but she will probably get a much better price going through Craigslist to a private buyer than through the retailers, FWIW. (They will want to pay little enough that they can mark them up and resell them after some tuneups.) I don't know of local spots that do old fridges other than a general salvage place (Ohmega Salvage in Berkeley is a good bet; there are a few in SF too).

boy i'll second that, jeffinmonterey. we waited over 6 months for our city to approve our plans and grant us the honor of a permit. they also put us into the design review fasttrack (which dinged us 1800 bucks) all because they couldn't visualize and, ostensibly, are biased against modern design. need to keep the mayberry aesthetic up you know. luckily our architect really pushed us into doing a model early on so when we plunked that down on the table during the design review meeting, the two bluehairs looked back and forth between their bi-focals and said "you know, this doesn't look anything like your drawings." they were wrong, though, it did. anyway, sorry for the rant. we interviewed 4 architects. three i found on the AIASF website and one was a friend of a friend who is a one woman operation in the city. we wound up going with her because we liked her vision and her personality. all four architects came to our house to scope things out and wound up staying between 1 to 2 hours. we did pay a retainer to get things going with the one we chose. she works on a percentage basis, 12% - 15% of the finished price tag. we never felt completely comfortable with that so we agreed to pass the baton after her initial drawings were complete. they were actually very detailed. my husband and i felt we didn't need so much hand holding through to the end and we have brought her in to tweak some things along the way. for that we pay her an hourly fee. we have had some stumbling points when things moved from her to the contractor's draftsman but our contractor is great at working these things out as we progress. it's been about 5 weeks since they kicked us out to start and the framers are really buzzing along. so far i'm quite happy. i'll happily pass on names and numbers if you'd like to contact me directly.

Are you asking about Miele's own factory service, or are you asking about third-party service companies? I think, during the warranty period, Miele uses their own service network. But at all other times, you can probably get any other reliable third party to help you with your service needs. Never had to call service for our dishwasher, yet. (And just for the record, we are super happy with our Miele DW). So, can't comment on how good or bad the local servicer is. We don't have any other Miele appliances, as other brands fit our needs better. We have friends in Canada who have a Miele fridge, and they are not at all happy with it (they might have gotten a lemon) and neither are they happy with service (but then, they live hours away from the next servicer).

We bought our Peninsula house from people who had just had it gutted and redone by Mueller Nicholls. They are a one stop shop. They did excellent work from what we can tell, and we are super picky. My husband is an engineer with a strong architecture background, so he has a clue of what to look for. There is one caveat about their kitchens and baths if you are a GW/Houzz devotee. They use a certified kitchen designer who used to work for Wood Mode, which is really great. But their kitchen designer is not quite up on how people here like to have their kitchens. And they build their own cabinets. My kitchen is gorgeous, but came without base drawers in the island and a wall of wasted space where a shallow cabinets would have been useful and two big sinks in a relatively small kitchen. Plus there was an unsupported overhang on the kitchen island, which Joe Corlett noticed when I was discussing redoing my kitchen. As I type this, it sounds bad, but I would use them again in a heartbeat. I would just be prepared to be active in designing the details of the kitchen and checking back here with the GW/Houzz experts. Good luck with your project. And remember you need to allow tremendously long lead times on getting anyone to start work. The waiting lists for contractors and such are almost as bad as the waiting lists for some schools in our area. These are the pictures from before I had things redone to my specifications. https://www.mnbuild.com PS The previous owners of our house highly recommended working with Mueller Nichols. They had nothing but praise for them.