Please ladies, enjoy your kitchens - you have to live with them all day every day. Unless you are thinking of selling in the really short term then have what you love - the next person will probably replace it all anyway, especially if you plan on being in your home for even 10 years. Kitchens are changing so much with all the new technology and products coming on the market. Mcctrish more photos of your kitchen would be helpful, I really can't comment too much with the photo you have provided, but I have just totally redone my kitchen (all for me) and I intended having a glass splashback but when the time came, I found it was just too plain and would do nothing for my kitchen. I think with the glass, you need to have a stunning feature colour to make it effective. That was my problem, there was no colour I could have to make it 'sing'. Look at photos on Houzz and you will see that glass splashbacks are the feature of kitchens. Start with the splashback before you decide anything else. Also, if you are just replacing your doors, are there any other fixed panels in the room that will be replaced also or will it be necessary for them to stay, which will then affect what you choose.

Nicole, a lot depends on your lifestyle and how you use your kitchen and the adjoining room. My kitchen is similar to yours and with my recent renovation I Ieft the shelf which divides the kitchen and my family room as it provides more of a servery to the sitting area on the other side, than a place to actually sit. My wall oven sits under it and the hotplates are beside that so an island would not have worked for me and I really had no need for the sitting space. Personally I rather think that could be a nuisance in the other room. Check that aspect out thoroughly. If you turn your chairs sideways against the wall, that would be about the space your bench top and stools will take up. As far as a long cupboard to the bench top, from experience I just have to say DON'T. I had a long pantry cupboard like that in my original kitchen, the bench top extended into it to hold my every day appliances out of sight. Honestly, it drove me nuts because the doors constantly got in the way and I had to keep working around them. You could possibly use a roller door but I have seen a lot of them that just do not last. As far as splashback goes, I don't know what your budget is but I note your tiles go to the floor. Do you want to keep them like this or minimalize to just around the bench top. Removing the tiles will probably leave the wall quite damaged, so you could need to replace the wall or put a thin layer of Villaboard over it and start again. I think your subway tiles look fine, can you match them and just have them worked into the area where the glass tiles come out. Am I right in assuming your cupboards and walls are yellow? It looks a similar colour to mine except I have a white benchtop and agonised for ages over the splashback. I ended up choosing a mosaic glass tile to give the kitchen a bit of bling. With your bench top though, the plain white tiles are neat and fresh - I love the yellow, white and black combination. .

you can buy an additive for paint that slows the drying down on water based gloss/ semi gloss paint. We have painted the back of our island with same problem. waiting for weather to cool down before we redo.

Polyurethane finish, white semi Gloss finish. New surface for Scrach resistency and light Trafiic avalible.