My youngest daughter.

And the bookcase we added when we moved the wall in the breakfast room because it wasn't symmetrical. (Thank you to the GW'er who suggested it. The bookcase.)

My kitchen took so long (4 years) that I finessed some details that are very important to the final product that I would have missed out on had things gone quickly. I also found a much better contractor.

I love that extra sill for the level of detail it adds, and because it is such a traditional window with a deep embrasure, I think it looks more fitting than a flush counter--which would read more contemporary to my eyes. I may not have known the difference had it been flush, but this result is better.

I ordered a double bowl Silgranit sink online and they sent me a 1-3/4 bowl sink. At first I was going to send it back, but then it turned out that I had very little room behind the sink for the faucet, etc. and having the 3/4 side was an absolute lifesaver....

My carbs pullout. :) There was less than a foot on the lowers between the fridge run and the corner unit. I said to put a pullout there, that I could use it for cereal. I was thinking oatmeal, which would be right by the sink, kitchen dishes and Advantium there. Not a real need. Something to do with that piece of emptiness. My mother keeps all cereal, cookies and bread in her breakfast room, partially for point of use, partially because when it was built the packaging wasn't so good, and pantry pests sometimes came home with the food. This contained them. I've only had that happen to me once--and it was some fancy, Italian pasta so would always be in the main pantry anyway--but I'm loving the little pullout. It has oatmeal, farina, cookies, and when I get tired of it on the counter, the bread. Sometimes some other snack stuff. It's marvelously convenient and totally a happy accident.

Palimpsest, like yours, our kitchen renovation has been over 4 years in the making. We originally hired and promptly fired an architect when our 'historicist' leanings clashed with his modern, as in contemporary (or die), aesthetic. We said goodbye with a gift certificate to our favourite restaurant and parted friends. Then we hired and fired an architectural drafting company when their draftsperson proved a wiz at AutoCad, but a disaster at actual measuring. We then vetted, but gasped and gave up on, a structural engineering firm. Finally, we bought hundreds of dollars of reference books and magazines, subscribed to the entire Taunton line-up, mastered Sketch-up, made a zillion draft designs, found GW, and finally settled on our kitchen design. We've been our own GC, KD, and general labourer(s) all the way along. We hired amazing tradespeople and a wonderful cabinetmaker who brought expertise where we needed it.

Time and direct involvement definitely allow the happy accidents to happen, otherwise the whole renovation may have been an accident, and we'd be looking for a new house...

Mtnrdredux, we definitely can't afford an accident like that, but congratulations!

Pillog, another happy accident of ours is that we went low carb about a year ago. An excellent decision, because as it turns out we'd've had no room for your carb pull-out. Low carb definitely saves on pantry requirements.

Vickimp, we purchased an inexpensive round second sink on a whim instead of the 16ga. square we'd been planning on. As it turns out, the square shape would've allowed little room for our faucets, so like you, we were rewarded with space.

Sandn, to be clear, that was the last kitchen reno, and she just turned 8. But yes it is an expensive mistake!

Finding GW!
If not for GW, then we would have overspent on cabs by a ton.
I stumbled on this forum 4+ years ago and the delay gave me time to learn so much. We also had time to change our minds on many things that could have been mistakes.
One happy accident was from the Ikea 3D planner. I was trying to construct the back of my island from wall cabs facing away from my kitchen. I needed them to be tall to hide the back of our stove. The planner plopped one cab down facing into our kitchen, and I got the idea to leave the doors off and make it a cubby. So now we have 2 cubbies that effectively expand our counter space and make perfect resting places for our small electrics. The view from our dining room is the air space above our kitchen, but not a clear view into the room to see the sink and any kitchen mess from preparing meals. If our stove did not have a tall back, our layout may have ended up being too open. This way, a person in the kitchen is not confined because the layout is quite open at eye level and someone can see the den and dining room from the kitchen and vice versa, yet people seated in dining room see the cook mostly from the shoulders up (or maybe just the eyes in my case, lol).

Not quite the same thing but some of my happy accidents are the one-time visits to a showroom just at the moment something was there on sale. I got a few key items that way. We're getting closer to installing our nutty mosaic checkerboard marble baseboards and short mosaic backsplash--I'm all a-twitter. When I came home with this stuff DH was surprised but he's bought into the idea fully. They will be the making of the new rooms. For $75!

Our GC ordered the wrong size (9" too short) steel i-beam, this mess up, together with consultations he had with the engineer trying to save the beam helped us realize that by ordering a new one even longer beam and off-setting the beam slightly from the underlying support (don't do this without a structural engineer signing off on it) from the underlying post, we could actually get rid of a small 12" remaining piece of wall that we thought we had to have and entirely open up the kitchen to the living room. Huge difference from a lucky mistake.

Mntrdredux,you are fortunate to be able to produce yet another gorgeous kitchen, but I hope for your sake that your productivity doesn't extend any further.
Dianalo, our island (two tier) also offers a visual buffer for the kitchen from other rooms, but under the upper level, on the kitchen side, is a huge recess where we can store things completely out of sight. Secret command central. We agree with your commendation of 3-D rendering software. The 3-D drawings are great for visualizing scale and volume.
And of course we wish we'd found GW earlier. What a wealth of information and generous people!
Florantha, can't wait to see your steal of a backsplash and marble baseboards(!) in situ.
Krisma, we also have a supporting beam resting on a vestige of an original wall from a renovation in the 40s. We incorporated our wall remnant as best we could at the end of our counter run, but I bet it makes a huge difference in your space to have been able to dispense with it altogether.
Sometimes, accidental benefits accrue from being around to ask the right question at the right moment. Some things we hadn't dared to dream about in the planning stages became apparent and feasible only during the construction stage.

I'm not done yet so I don't have one of these yet but I thought I'd interject with a funny saying. We have a friend that's an engineer. He's always tweaking on something and looking at design elements. He likes to say that if he can't figure out a way to eliminate a small issue that is bugging him he will look for a way to make that issue IMPORTANT. He takes the "it's not a flaw...it's a feature" viewpoint and that often solves the issue in some wonderful, unexpected way. That is what this thread is all about.

My GC ordered the wrong floor tiles and I went ahead and installed them. I secretly like them better than the ones I originally wanted.

My husband fell through the ceiling and we discovered the perfect place for our skylight!

Not really an "accident", but a great surprise... We didn't realize that Kraftmaid "stock" drawers came self-closing. We just thought we were getting soft close. I thought they'd made a great mistake when I first got to play with the new drawers! :)

My husband fell through the ceiling and we discovered the perfect place for our skylight!

That one made me LOL, but then I felt really bad. Hope he was uninjured!

"My husband fell through the ceiling and we discovered the perfect place for our skylight!"

That also made me burst out laughing! And like Marcy I immediately felt guilty. Hope he was okay.

We're still in the thinking process...so no mistakes yet...but GW has some fantastic ideas!

The floor joist that landed right under where the toilet was supposed to sit (and drain) prompted a during-construction floor plan change that gave me a bigger sewing area and my walk-in pantry. Don't know what I'd do without either.

I also like the step up to the window sill!

plllog - no pic of the little pull out?

We had been trying to figure out how to deal with the transition between our rangetop and the countertop. Our rangetop is a Bluestar on our island. The back of island trim for it has two screws that would be visible because they are above the countertop which we didn't much like.

Well, the installers messed up slightly on the rangetop cutout. It was done on site and our quartzite is very hard to cut so they got slightly out of square. Our fabricator suggested that they could make trim pieces from the quartzite to go around the range top to cover the mistake. It also covered the screws on the back.

The fabricator didn't have to pay for a new slab, we got to keep the slab we loved and the rangetop looks much nicer in it:

I have to add that when our new kitchen/den floors got ruined, we were crushed. They had been the one and only choice in our minds for our house and it was a tough blow.
Then, when at someone's house to buy a bedroom set from CL for our ds who is ready for his own bedroom, the owner mentioned some other things she was selling because she was moving in a few days. It turns out that they did pre-finished mahogany floors throughout their house and had enough left over to almost cover our den. She asked $150 for approx 110 square feet, which is amazing. When we thought about adding a box to have enough, dh said we should buy enough to cover the adjacent dining room as well (very open plan). Our dining room floor is oak, but it needed redoing anyway (as do all our oak floors). It has a "hump" in it that would have remained, but since we are ripping out, we can now have corrected. It also would have not looked as smooth visually to have the floors transition along the border as they are different width planks than our oak as well as the different grain. I had counted on using furniture to hide some of that. We will stain the oak floors to look well near each other, but not to try to match.
Now, both rooms will flow better and the transition between wood floors will be approx 3.5' where it changes to the living room oak instead of approx 13 feet.
We still have to figure what to do with the kitchen floors, but at least we are happy about the den and dining room ones. The kitchen look would not work as well with the mahogany and the cost would be higher than other choices. The cost of buying all the mahogany for the den/dr at retail would have been a burden and we would probably have not considered it, cost aside, without falling into the bargain we got.