Carpet tack strips are wooden boards installed around the perimeter of a floor to hold carpet in place. They work pretty decent until you decide to remove them and find those unsightly holes left behind in the concrete floor. If you want to stain your concrete floor, you can simply leave the holes as-is. By picking a darker color stain for the floor you could make the holes less noticeable. You can still see them through the stain, however a lot of people say it adds character to the floor and they like it. Secondly, installing a concrete overlay border along the perimeter of the room would be another option. This is a popular choice as it is very economical and allows for you to create a color scheme using one color for the border and another color for the rest of the floor. You could also install a concrete overlay over the entire floor. This gives you a brand new finish to work with, allowing you to create a solid surface with no variations. This works well for areas where a border would add too much dimension, as installing a border around a lot of corners and nooks can be too much for the eye in some spaces. Lastly, another option you have for dealing with those carpet tack strip holes in your concrete floor is installing epoxy flooring over them. Epoxy flooring has been around for many years, but few people have realized the beauty and functionality that it adds to living spaces. It’s easy to clean, great for people with allergies and of course creates a surface like no other. We hope that we have given you some solutions for those unsightly tack strip holes that are very common in remodeling projects. If you have any questions, please drop us a line at info@solidimpressionstx.com or visit our website at http://www.solidimpressionstx.com. Here is to your home improvement success! Sincerely, Caton Owner Solid Impressions Abilene Texas Premium Decorative Concrete & Epoxy

Could you attach a photo? Photos must be in jpeg format to attach to Houzz. It is hard to give suggestions without knowing what the base looks like.

This is not normal and a clearly improper way to secure decking "invisibly". Having wood dowels like this with no means to secure the dowel itself to the deck support framing, means that the decking is mostly, if not all, floating and free to move and lift. There are many valid deck invisible fasteners on the market but they most all work in the same manner. The sides of decking boards are grooved to accept a metal or plastic fastener "that gets screwed to the framing" so that in turn the decking boards are held down with it. Below is an example of this type of fastening. "This" is a deck project we did using Trex decking and fasteners.

If that is a cooktop, where is the oven? To get a gas line over there to the island will involve tearing up your floor if you have no basement. I love the idea of the prep sink and make the island a large as you can. You present house has a very useable island. That is probably why you love it. Live with what you have for a few months, I did that and completely changed my idea and so glad I waited a while to test the traffic pattern, cooking triangle. I don't personally like crossing the kitchen to get to a sink or a stove. If you cook, there is a lot of traffic between the two.