Kitchen and tiles

Thursday afternoon, we had an appointment with the kitchen studio.  It was to finalize our decisions- we didn't really finalize anything, and after 3 1/2 hours, decided that 8:00 pm was time to call it quits for the night.  We have to finalize next week.
We were assigned to a new designer, as our original designer retired in August.  I really liked our old designer, but after a few hours with our new guy, I realized that the original guy was ready to retire.  This new guy had so many fantastic ideas. 
He started out by informing us that the kitchen company we are going with changed the drawer size. This means reconfiguring the set ups of the drawers.  Joern and I have quite a bit of homework here, trying to decide how to best utilize the space for our needs.  He showed us a lot of options for things we can put inside the drawers to better organize everything.  Wow!
We also discussed the countertop.  Our new kitchen guy showed us a honed granite countertop, which we really loved.  It works nicely for both of us, because Joern was never a fan of the high polish, and I was never a fan of high polished black, because I heard that they are a total pain to keep streak-free. 
It is still black, but with a slightly uneven surface.  I really love it!  Of course, it is more expensive than our orignal choice, but it is about 100 Euro per sq. meter more expesnive, and in reality, we don't have that many square meters of countertop space. 
We also discussed our range hood. We have a unique, but growingly more common, problem with our range hood: because we have an air filtration system and our high efficiency air-heat pump, our range-hood cannot vent outside.  Our air has to be filtered, and recycled into the house.  We're fairly certain that the air-filtration system will deal with the damp, but Joern was so worried about the smells.   Joern brought up his concern with the new kitchen guy, who promptly had a solution- an active charcoal filter that can be installed in any range hood.  The filter is HUGE and heavy. It is refillable, and the kitchen guy suggested that since we like to cook, we refill the charcoal once a year.  The packets are about 40 Euro, which seems like a good investment if we're considering keeping smells out of our living area!  The kitchen guy also made a few modifications in the range hood, so that the air can be properly exhausted. 
From range hood, we went over all the rest of the appliances.  We flip-flopped the dish sink and dishwasher, because even though the designers agree that the dishwasher should be on the left of the sink if you are right-handed, ours is currently on the right side of the sink, and I love it there!  The designer also has to play a bit with the location of the dish sink along the wall, as well as the cabinets.  I guess there was a little poor planning involved, one of our dining room outlets will endup being covered by the kitchen cabinets.  Hmmm....
Then, it was on to the microwave.  Joern brought up that the interior space of the microwave was really bothering him.  We microwave a lot, and usually use our lovely, gigantic Pfaltgraff plates.  Joern was really concerned that for us, going from our countertop microwave with tons of space to a built-in tiny microwave was going to be miserable.  New kitchen guy had a solution- which excites me :)  He suggested a combination oven / microwave.  Since its an oven, it has much larger capacity than a traditional built-in microwave.  Plus, I was already worried about Thanksgiving, when we usually use our oven, my mother-in-law's oven, plus a tiny countertop oven.  This way, I am getting THREE ovens for our Thanksgiving party! 
From there, it was on to the prep sink.  We need to look at a bunch of prep sinks and decide which we like the best.
New kitchen guy also asked us about solutions for the garbage.  Joern really wanted a hole in the island, this way he could just sweep the scraps from the veggies away.  So, New kitchen guy showed us a system, basically a hole in the countertop, you just pull up the cover, and the scraps go into a little bin underneath the countertop, which you then empty out.  He also suggested an alternative, an electrically supported drawer underneath the prep sink.  You just bump on the drawer and it opens!  So, you can have your hands full of veggie scraps, and bump the drawer with your knee, and the door opens like magic! We decided for the drawer, as it was cheaper, and for me, who empties the garbage, the better choice.
The final discussion focused on the cabinet doors.  The doors we origianlly chose is no longer in production, so we had to chose new doors.  Our original plan was a white, high-gloss, mission style door, but the new version had slightly more undefined lines.  New kitchen guy showed us few other white door options.  I pointed to a matte finish beaded cabinet, saying that those are the doors I usually like best.  But, when we took out the two door samples and held them together, we both decided we liked the high-gloss one much better.  The color was just a lot nicer.  Well, thank you very much, New kitchen guy, because he suggested we take the door samples home over the weekend to decide.  There is a HUGE difference between seeing something in a showroom and seeing it in your home.  We placed them in the kitchen, so that the light would hit them the way it will when the kitchen is installed.

It isn't so easy to tell how much better the one on the left looks in real life, but believe me, it looks significantly better!  Its something about the color of white.  The door on the right looks so much more yellowish in our house, and the one on the left, which looked almost gray in the showroom, looked to be a lot more of a true white in the house.I want to return to the house with some paint samples, and I really wish we could have had a sample of the granite, but there is almost no argument. Plus, even Joern agreed that the beaded doors fit in with the decor of the house much better than the mission style cabinet. 
New kitchen guy had to pretty much redraw the kitchen, because it didn't transfer properly into his software program when he inherited our kitchen.  So, the plan is that he'll finish the drawings in the upcoming few days, and we'll go back to finalize the decision, so that the kitchen can be ordered.

In other house news, "Cute Tile Guy," was back yesterday.  Yesterday's job was to grind down the surface of the "Estrich," or that concreteish substance above the radiant heating.  He did this in the cellar.  The other job was to paint on a waterproofing layer on the floors and on the shower walls, and surrounding the bathtub. 

We did discover a tile problem though, which made us both quite mad, and was probably a poor way to start off the weekend.  Joern picked me up from coffee (okay, bubbly apple juice,) with a friend, and on the car ride home, he said to me, "did you know your mosaic tiles cost 2/3 the price of the entire tile bill?"  I said I knew they were expensive, but didn't think they would cost that much.  Then, Joern told me, well it was 17 sq. meters of mosaic, for the master shower, and for the bathtub surround.  It was at that moment, I realized that there was an error, that the mosaic was ordered for the entire shower, including the walls.  This was NOT our plan!  We wanted the travertine mosaic tiles on the shower floor and as a border on the shower walls, the rest of the shower walls were going to the the same tile as the floor in the master bath.  Turns out that Mr.B called Joern when I was in the States to finalize the order for the tiles, and Joern said something like, "I don't feel comfortable doing this without Allison being here," to which Mr. B said something about time not being on our side, and that the order needed to be placed.  So, when Mr. B asked Joern about the mosaic covered shower walls, Joern was uncertain, but agreed that this was correct.  It was NOT!  So, at 7 pm on a Friday, Joern called Mr. B.  Obviously, we are most upset with that annoying lady at the tile showroom, Ms. Gray, who had no problem insulting me and my home country, but couldn't even get our tile order correct.  But, Joern was also upset with Mr. B, who kept putting off the tiles, which left us in the unfortunate spot that the tiles needed to be ordered, and I wasn't there.  Mr. B managed to calm down Joern a little, by saying that despite the fact that it says on the order form that the mosiac tiles are not returnable, he will fix it.  But we are still so angry with the annoying lady at the tile place.  We've even decided that the final tile order we need to make, for the shower in the cellar, will be done through another tile showroom, the one "Cute Tile Guy" works with, because we do not want to run the risk of having to deal with Ms. Gray again!  I am only hoping that this doesn't mess us up too much time-wise, as cute tile guy wants to be done by the end of next week. 

Well, that's all the news for right now.  I'm sure this upcoming week will be full of updates!