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I'm in a picture lull (hoping for more from anyone who volunteers) so I thought I'd tell a short story about our Kitchen. After work and on weekends, Doug and I used to operate a small organic farm. We had a farm stand on the road. This was our major hobby. We like to be totally absorbed and working is our recreation, usually. Well, our professional workloads finally precluded doing a good job on the farm so we closed it. The point of this is that we were left with more time than we are used to. This we devoted to designing our Italian Kitchen from Oregon. We thought we were very smart and prepared. When we finally were able to deal with our dream Kitchen in Italy, we found the following: (not necessary true for everyone, I'm sure)
1) Italian kitchen suppliers do not like to hear about you
wanting a French cooker (kitchen stove, Americans),
2) The idea of using the floor tile to build the baseboards
around cabinets, not understood
3) Marble counters cheaper than tile
4) No ice cube makers in the refrigerators---and don't say you want an American refrigerator, would complicate the design and procurement---and you can't fit one in anyway--they are too big (and to my taste too ugly anyway--I like the Italian way of hiding it behind a wooden door)
5) We actually had a very fun time at the kitchen "place"--we learned Calabrese dialect for coffee (have no idea how it is spelled but it sounds like "golf") and they were frustrated with us and our pidgeon Italian in a very affable way. Doug was thrilled to talk about golf, but then realised it was about an espresso and gladly accepted the caffe.

I enclose the before kitchen picture and the drawing we got from the kitchen designer plus a pic of me appearing to converse with the kitchen designers. I'm sure I was saying buon giorno or va bene.