I've also never really liked our cook top that much either though when we bought the house I thought it would be pretty good. It's an electric cooker but it takes quite some time to heat up and then even longer to cool down. Between the oven and the cook top it made planning a meal being ready at the same time a little difficult. The other appliance that was getting on in age and had starting to make some funny noises was the fridge though I'm pretty sure we could have coaxed another couple of years out of it.
The other thing that we both never liked has been the pink tile all around the kitchen. I remember when we first walked through the house on a viewing we both commented how if we ever bought this place the first thing that would have to go would be the pink tile. Four and a half years later and we still have the pink tile.
So with all these things we thought what the heck, let's just do the entire kitchen! (At least it sounded like a good idea at the time.) Actually that's not totally true. One of our requirements in doing this was that whatever we did had to work with the existing floor tile. The tiles cover not only the kitchen area but they also run into the eating area and down the hall so we figured replacing all that tile would be well beyond our budget.
To get a picture of the whole kitchen I had to take two seperate ones and paste them together so that's why the island looks like it has a seam in the centre.
