Dear Faron: My husband read my post and made some corrections. I'll answer you and make the corrections below in UPPER CASE. I'M NOT YELLING, THOUGH :) 1) You applied a tinted latex primer over contractors work. Correct? YES 2) Exactly what primer & tone of color were used? BENJ MOORE PRIMER FRESH START ACRYLIC. STONE SOMETHING, A MEDIUM COLOR AT 50% WAS USED TO TINT. 3) Your own joint-compound repairs were done OVER this newly primed surface?? YES, BUT IT REALLY WASN'T THE SEAMS, IT WAS MORE SLIGHT LOW AREAS IN THE SKIM COAT. 4) Were YOUR repairs primed over? YES WITH THE SAME BENJ MOORE FRESH START. 5) What do you mean by the "joint-compound with a latex additive"? Or, am I mis-reading this? HUSBAND CORRECTED ME THAT IT WAS A VINYL SPACKLE. 6) At any point...was the wall ever sanded AND vacuumed off?? THE WALL WAS SANDED DOWN TO A SMOOTH FINISH AND WIPED WITH A DRY CLOTH PRIOR TO PAINTING. This is what we determined. Yesterday morning was foggy/dewy. This is being painted in our future house (old construction though) where no a/c or heat was run. Husband said the windows had condensation on the outside. The bubbling occurred most on the wall near the windows. The clue to our answer is, "Why didn't we have problems the first time we primed but had problems the second time we primed when the same products were being used each time." Now that we know the cause and will run the a/c or heater to dry any area prior to painting ever again, BUT what's the best way to handle what we have now? - Sanding, patching, repriming the bubbled areas...is it going to peel in adjacent areas? - If it didn't bubble, is it ok to paint the final coat of Benj Moore Regal Eggshell? Or do we need to Kilz now to try to prevent the whole wall from peeling off? Any insight is REALLY, REALLY appreciated. He worked a long time on that large entry way with 15' ceilings and are just sick over it. Thank you.

Sounds lovely. I don't think it's unusual to do different wall colors in the same room anymore. Especially with open floor plans where morning or familyrooms join or share a kitchen wall. I had to do the same in my kitchen and actually love the contrast. Good luck with your build. I'm going to have to look up Rosewood granite. I don't believe I've seen it before. Sounds beautiful.

Sure :). Here is a rough picture. Note not everything is exactly right since I couldn't do everything I wanted (or at least I couldn't figure it out). I couldn't get all the cabinet sizes just right either. The width of that wall is 14'. I will have a 5" filler to the left of the frig. There will be an oven under the cooktop, and I will have a micro/oven combo on the left wall. So I'm just wondering what the rule is, if any, for the placement of the hood/cooktop, in terms of how it should be centered. I will post a rough top-view as well in the next post, although it's not perfect. Thanks!

To move the cooktop to the perimeter location involves: Removing the perimeter countertop, which may break. The reason you have to remove it is because the cooktop will not fit into the cabinets below where you want it to be. You have 2 cabinets there, not a single cooktop cabinet. So you will need to move the cooktop cabinet there and one of those cabinets to the island. However, that won't work for your already installed flooring unless it runs under the cabinets. Of course, you could have an expert cabinet maker demolish the interior of the two side supports of those cabinets and rebuild them with additional support and then just cut a hole in the granite in place. Not cheap, either way. You will have to have an expert cabinet person modify the upper cabinet above to be shorter, or build an entirely new one to be shorter. Yes, you could just move it up, but then it would look really strange. If you can live with that, that would be the cheapest solution for the upper cabinet. It will still need to have a hole cut into it for the vent pipe. You will also have to run either gas or 220 electric to that location. Gas has to be in rigid black iron pipe. Only the last few feet can be in flexible stainless. THe plumber will have to calculate if you can T off of the gas supply that (I hope) is running through the attic and not just through the slab foundation. That black iron has to be run down through that outside wall from the attic and into the cabinet below the cooktop location. If you did induction, you'd have a similar herculean run all the way from the electrical box. That means tearing up the drywall surface to run those things, and then repairing it. That's best case scenario and they can actually manage to get the pipe to run through the stud cavity and not down the outside of the house. Then you'd have to deal with running the electrical for the vent, and cutting the hole in your house for the vent. That involves patching the exterior siding and installing a damper. And that is even if your jurisdiction would allow a vent straight out the wall in that location. In most locations, it's too close to an operable window to allow termination there and would have to go through the roof. Taking it through the roof involves a big old pipe sticking up quite a ways. It has to, because of code requirements and it's location there on the eaves. And it involves a roof penetration, which needs someone who knows the heck what they're doing for you not to have a leak. Not rocket surgery, but you'd be surprised at how often a "handyman" will screw it up. It's something you need an HVAC trade for, and possibly a roofer. More expensive, but you tend to rule out the "and master of none" jacks. Then, you'd have to replace the island counter. THe suggested butcher block would be a good budget friendly surface that would work. If the Brazillian Brown Silestone on the perimeter cracks, you'd need to be OK with them glueing it back together, or replacing it. Replacing it would be 5-7K, and I didn't count that in the total here at the end. All in all, you'd be spending a minimum of 10K to move the cooktop off of the island. Probably more, because it's an older house, and once you start touching stuff like electrical, you've got to bring some things up to current codes. And you'd still be left with a barrier island with the critical to access fridge on the wrong side of it, and the ovens in an inconvenient spot. You'd be left with the dumping ground of the desk area. You'd be left prepping on top of your cleanup area in about 30" of space. Meaning you will have a one person kitchen. "Spacious" isn't spacious when all of the zones are overlapping and everyone needs to use the same exact square footage that you do, or you have to put on rollerskates to get from one side of the space to the other. It doesn't matter if the kitchen is 20x20 if all of the zones overlap at the sink and you have to always walk around an obstacle to perform even the simplest sandwich prep. As I said, the cheapest option at this point would be to do an overhead vent through the roof and then replace the island counter with one with more overhang. That would only cost you 4-5K or so. It would still leave the other issues that the kitchen has, and it would reduce your aisle way in front of the fridge, but it would get you through until you could address the rest of the issues in a more complete redo.