I have a $4,000- Vielux grill. They stopped making them a couple of yesrs ago. I love the grill but I also have some regrets. On the love side: This thing COOKS! After we bought it, we went over a friends house and they just bought a grill that looked as good as mine for a fraction of the cost. I tried to make a recipe that I made on my grill. I cut fresh peaches in half, dipped the open part in sugar and carmelized the sugar, face down on the grill. (I can post the whole recipe if anyone is interested). It didn't work. The peaches got mushy, and the sugar didn't get carmelized. It didn't have the power. The differece on meats is even more dramatic. It also take less time to cook on high heat. Even heat is important too. That requires cleaning the parts where the gas comes out. I recomend finding out how hard it is to clean those parts before you make a decision. The apect that I'm unhappy about is that the cavity is so large that if I want to make 2 lamb chops, I have to turn on at least half the grill, what a waste of gas! I asked the salesman when I bought it "what if I want to make one or two lambchops?" He said that's easy, you just turn on one or two rows of heat. The problem is that one row of heat barely get the it warm, it can't char meat. Don't let them tell that it will be different with an other grill, it won't. I wish I had a grill with two cavities, like my parents had.

"The tiler told him that he's gotten four jobs as a result of our glowing review on Yelp (with pictures), and I only posted it 3 weeks ago. I'm guessing that was "tip enough" :-)" If you felt the job he did was so fantastic that you took the 20-30 minutes to write up a glowing review and upload pictures, I would think a small gift would have been appropriate as well as the glowing review I am a small developer/cpntractor, very common for everyone in the company to receive small gifts from happy clients....can be something as small as a $10 Dunkin Donuts GC to a $100 Amazon card, last week we had a large basket of fruit delivered to our office from a project we finished a couple weeks ago along with a lovely well written note that was very appreciated by everyone in the company Have never considered it to be "unprofessional" when we (or any of the guys) received a tip.....and have certainly never considered it to be unprofessional to give any of my subcontractors a tip/gift at the end of a job well done, even though I was paying them for the work they had done

We just moved in this month. I removed the fake jennaire cooktop and micro/wall oven combo. Installed a nice gas range and 600 cfm ducted hood. A clean smelling home is important and I hate lingering food odors. We removed the Formica counters held together with scotch tape. Did oiled butcher block on the island where the cooktop had been. Did porcelain tile, which I had and loved in previous kitchen, for perimeter counters with new sink and faucet. We are keeping the oak cabinets oak, as they are high quality. I added new stainless pulls. I will be painting the trim and the doors to the room all in white. I will eventually paint the island cabinets a washed black/gray color. Goal is to be done for thanksgiving. So to me, a good gas stove, good hood, and functional counters and a deep sink are what I think is important to make a kitchen a pleasure to use.

See if you can use standard off the shelf vanities instead of something custom and put the money you save there toward complete retiling. It probably is best to rip it all out if you're going in. We found we had a very small leak in a shower floor in a small bathroom (dating from 30-40 years previous) that we didn't know about, but it was dripping water into the ceiling below very slowly over time which is never a good thing. I have to say I wouldn't want an acrylic shower/tub combo in my bathroom, but there is one in our secondary bathroom where we live now and it's really not bad. It's a Kohler. I think it's been there 25 years and it still looks new. So that really might be a good, inexpensive option for a guest bath as Patricia says. They're easy to clean.