Hi Lil, I believe your original plan works much better than the revised version. While the notion of ideal working widths is great, the larger problem here is the post. I worked on a project very similar to this last year where a post could either be connect to, or separate from the island. What we found was that by separating the island the space between island and post became very awkward. It's not enough of a space to comfortably walk through or be seated at the island in front of. Instead of your room feeling open and generous in proportion, it is going to start to feel cramped and awkward. We have a kitchen in our showroom (Kitchen Studio Tauranga NZ) with a 6ft gap between bench and back wall and it works wonderfully. It allows someone to work at the sink and a second at the island with ease. Stick with the original plan. It will feel a lot more spacious, without compromising work flows.

Now that's a cook's kitchen, are you keeping all appliances along with benchtops. You said that you were keeping the same footprint, if the base cabinets are still in good condition would you keep them as is and just replace the wall cabinets with Bunnings paintable shaker style in a soft grey and paint the walls the same colour, still keeping the oven cabinet in Beech. At the moment your kitchen has a lot of great stainless steel and wonder why the bronze cooper splash back, trend?, I can see by the photo that the kitchen is a bit dark, so perhaps a mirrored splash back would reflect more light and would look great with the stainless benchtop and the soft grey. If you are not keen on the mirror for the splash back and breakfast bar the white tiles could be replaced with French Country white and grey tiles Beech wood looks great with greys and black & white. I would look at replacing the Stools, Kmart have $25 dollar stools, different colours Lighting, an easy cheaper lighting is to use track lighting as you only need to have the one connection, tracks can be joined and placed in any shape or position where light is needed, like over the sink. You can use both spotlight and pendant lighting with these. PLEASE replace any open corner shelves with cabinets. This would be very cheap to achieve, good luck

Hi Wally, when your tops were made, all the corners and folds were welded and flushed, whereby making invisible joins. You could now get a Stainless Steel Fabricator back in to weld up these holes and then flush the welds and resurface the whole benchtop; bringing it back to its original condition and making the holes invisible. Hope this is of help to you. Malcolm

As mentioned a couple of photos would help. I would go with stainless to match the appliances etc, leaving the gold for the light fittings good luck, cheers