I think your second option is the best. Take to the height of the hood at stove and window locations.

Do you mean the bottom of the cabinet crown?

Yes the top of the upper cabinet where the crown starts. Sorry I should have been more specific. It made sense in my head:)

ditto. take them up to where the cabinets/crown end. it's fine to have the small gap because it will be continuous around the room.

could you stop the tile at just the bottom of cabs? yes. but you hardly have any backsplash as it is. take it up to the top. hell, tile the small strip above the cabinets as well! might as well fill in everything.

too bad you couldn't have used a thicker crown and taken it to the ceiling

Unfortunately I wasn't thinking about tile when the cabinet folks gave me that option. They did ask but I had just torn out a soffit and raised the ceiling so it seemed like so much space to fill with just crown. That picture looks nice though. Maybe that would have worked. Hindsight is 20/20 though, right?

I think I'm leaning toward bringing it to the top of the cabinet crown. Countertop measure isn't until tomorrow so I've got a couple of weeks to mull it over.

I appreciate everyone's feedback though!! Thanks!!

kitchen still looks great. love the ceiling. what countertop and tile are you using?

Thanks! Lots of planning and stressing whether or not the choices I'm making are ones I'm going to love in a few years. I have been planning this kitchen in my head for a long time and I want to make sure I'm happy with it in the end!! :) We live in a 100+ year old farm house so I want the look to be pretty simple and classic. We uncovered a brick chimney and found the old wood floors under piles of "new" tile and vinyl, so I had those things to think of when I was choosing my other elements. I'm going with a bone colored subway tile with natural grout and Venetian Ice granite. The granite has been a challenge to pick out. It is so hard to visualize what that giant slab will look like cut down and in the house, but I have been to the slab yard enough that I am pretty confident it is what I want. I needs to have a little warmth to go with the floors and the buttery yellow brick of the chimney, but I don't want it looking too gold. Thanks for the ceiling compliment. We used this in another room to cover some terrible popcorn ceiling and loved it. I used the same technique to finish this ceiling- just a whitewash with watered down ceiling paint. A few days later I walked into the room and wanted to cry. The tannins in the wood had started to bleed through and the pine knots and other areas of the wood were turning yellow!! Thanks to google I found a fix- I painted it again with a thin layer of Binz shellac based primer. So far so good now. The paint isn't quite as transparent but there is no yellow so I'm satisfied.