An island is plumbing,
wiring and walking space.
The cabinet is the easy part.

That is a clearance question, not a size question. Fix the walkway you need around it first - around 42 inches for one cook, 48 where two people work, and more wherever an appliance door opens into the gap - and the island is whatever floor is left. If nothing sensible is left, a peninsula or a moveable cart may serve you better, and we will say so.

It depends entirely on what goes in it. A cabinet run with a worktop on it generally does not. Add a sink, a cooktop, gas, new circuits, or take out a wall, and you are into permitted work. We confirm this against your address and your scope before anything starts.

Often, yes - that is one of the more common versions of this job. The questions are whether the clearance works and what is under the floor. If the island stays clear of services, it can be a genuinely contained project.

Whatever is left after the walkways are fixed. A long, relatively narrow island usually works better in a real kitchen than a large square one, because a square island is too deep to reach across and pushes the walkways tight at the ends.

Enough depth for knees and enough width per seat that two people are not sharing an elbow, and the two heights are different: counter height and bar height want different overhangs and different stools. Beyond a certain unsupported length the stone needs support underneath, and your fabricator specifies that for the material chosen.

Whichever you use facing the room. A sink in the island suits people who prepare and wash while talking to the room; a cooktop suits people who cook that way, but it brings the extraction question with it. Putting both in is possible and usually crowds the worktop.

One where the worktop turns down the side of the island to the floor instead of stopping at the cabinet. The corner is a mitred joint, and it looks right when the veining runs continuously around it - which means the pieces are cut from the same slab in a planned order.

In most South Florida homes, a concrete slab on grade. That matters because any service going to an island - drain, water, gas, or a circuit - has to be routed through it, which means saw-cutting and trenching the concrete and then making the floor good.

Not through a wall, because there is not one. It is done either with a loop vent run below the floor or with an air admittance valve where the jurisdiction permits one - and not all of them do. It is designed for what your building department accepts before the trench is cut.

Sometimes, and it is a common way to make room for an island. Whether the wall is load-bearing is established properly rather than assumed. Where it is, that means structural design, a permit and support in place before anything is removed.

It needs a real answer, because there is no wall behind it. That is either a ceiling-mounted hood over the island or a downdraft within it. Hoods above a certain extraction rate can also require a make-up air provision, which is confirmed against the code edition in force at your address.

Countertop receptacles are GFCI-protected and are never installed face-up in the worktop. Whether one is required in the island itself depends on which code edition your jurisdiction has adopted, and that requirement has changed in recent editions - so we confirm which applies rather than working from memory.

For a clear island added to a working kitchen, often not at all. Where the slab is being cut or a peninsula is coming out, there is a genuine period without it, and the honest length depends on the scope and the inspection schedule.

Wherever a slab is trenched, the floor over that route is opened. If your existing tile or wood can be matched, the patch disappears. If it cannot - a discontinued tile, an aged wood finish - it will be visible, and we raise that before cutting anything, never after.

Because the photograph shows the part that costs least. What decides the number is under the floor: whether the slab is being cut, how far the services have to run, and whether anything structural is involved.

In rough order: putting a sink or cooktop in it, cutting a slab to reach it, removing a load-bearing wall, matching a floor that no longer exists, and waterfall ends. The stone itself is usually not the biggest line.

We measure the finished walkways with you against what was set out on the floor at the start, confirm every drawer and door clears, run the water and the extraction, and check the overhang support is doing its job.

Follow the fabricator's care instructions for the specific material - marble, quartz and granite are genuinely different, and some need sealing while others never do. The vertical face of a waterfall end takes knocks at floor level, so that is the part worth watching.