Kitchen, part 3

Here come the cabinets. It's starting to look like a kitchen again!
This first photo is from the opposite side of the room than I am usually standing in to take progress pictures. I'm standing in the DR doorway right now. Here's the wall that will be the sink and fridge side. The fridge will go in this close leftside corner, then the DW, then the sink base. There will be two upper cabs for either side of the window and a cabinet over the fridge.

This next photo is the wall that used to be our "eat-in" area on the opposite side of the room from the DR. I'm usually standing here when snapping photos. This will be our "mud room" since that back door you can partially see is our main entrance to the house from the garage. In fact, it's more commonly used by visitors, neighbor kids, etc. than is our front door. And since everyone comes in here and just drops their shoes, bags, groceries, mail, etc., but it was always an unorganized and cluttered space. I needed something more suited to the way we live. So this will give me some cabinet space for pans, small appliances, etc, but then we'll have this little bench area for kids to sit and put on/off shoes as they go in and out, there will be drawers below for shoes, scarves, mittens, etc. in the winter and swim goggles, flip flops, etc. in the summer. And there will be some hooks on the wall for hanging backpacks, the diaper bag, and stuff. Then there will be open shelves for my cook books and all my chachka, and then I will have a little "office" area on the right as a place to organize mail, calendar, and all the week's school stuff. Well, this is the idea anyway. Here's Adam testing out a piece of cardboard as a countertop to simulate our island. The island is in cherry (and the perimeter cabs are in painted maple) and we'll have a slide-in downdraft range in the middle. There will be a 12" overhang for some saddle stools and a place for kids to eat breakfast and snacks. It won't be a transition to be eating all of our family meals in the DR as we were doing that already as our "eat-in" area was too small for a table that would seat all of us.
We'll have soapstone countertops that we....uh, I mean Adam..... is fabricating and installing himself. We found a place in New Jersey where we can buy the slab for a quarter the price of going through a normal fabricator/installer. Soapstone is a softer stone than granite and it can be dry cut. We found a few people online who have done it DIY and so Adam has been in email contact with one guy back and forth and with the stone supplier about the details. It's looking somewhat promising, and we don't an especially difficult space either. It looks like we'll only have to do one seam. It's the cut-outs for the undermount sink and the stove that will be tricky.

This picture is a mock-up with some paper plates to give me a feel for choosing some pendants for the island. I've been in agony for a couple of days about choosing a pendant. Well, I finally ordered one since the electrician will be back on Monday to wire in the stove and the rest of the plugs. I sure hope I like them. I'll leave the details until then just in case I say what they are and then I get negative feed back. I'm not sure I could take it right now. So, whatever you see after Monday, just tell me they look great!

Everything is pretty exciting right now. However, we've hit a few snags: most of the drawer fronts were slightly different color than the rest of the cabs and doors; no seat top for the bench built-in; two warped doors on the pantry wall; ends are slightly different color than face frames; sent wrong size for over refrigerator; and wrong size ordered for side of window. Yikes.
Can you see that the drawer on the left is lighter than the one on the right?
So yesterday the Company Rep and the salesperson who sold us the cabs came out to evaluate. It was a good meeting and the Rep saw that we were not just making this stuff up or being overly picky. So they took a good door and will send it back to do some color matching for the replacement parts and for some skins to fit over the ends. They'll also re-order replacements for the warped doors and for the wrong sized cabinets, and they're going to custom make a top for the bench area for us. For the most part it means that we can still move ahead with the installation, floors, and counters to getting a functional kitchen. The down side is that it puts us a good 3 weeks out from getting completely finished as we can't do anything about the uppers and trim installed along sink and fridge wall.
Oh well.

Ok. This is where we are so far.