I prefer painting this setup, as it hides imperfections that are going to arise using this strategy, but you could stain & poly it as well. 

Keep stressing that-Have "bad" pictures of your house showing any imperfections-Accept any deal that you are able to reach at the informal hearing. 

They get loose, the world is an imperfect place.

We only use top tier granite in our projects, many times when you see a crazy low price on granite, they are using an inferior grade which means it has more fissures and imperfections.  

And usually, you have to hold a 10% of retention of their contracted scope as leverage for them to close out the job or get them to come back and touch up on imperfections.

I heard a lot of good things about Ikea's cabinets too, and would like to suggest that you use someone that has experience install IKEA cabinets specifically because they are built different from traditional cabinets.As far as the countertop, I chose quartz and a grey color quartz to be exact, because they are the best to hide imperfections.  

Because this was not a higher end rental, I did not want to spend thousands refinishing the hardwoods.I sanded them with the hardest grit sandpaper I could find, then painted them a very dark color (black in my case) to cover up the many, many imperfections, and put two quotes of polyurethane on them twice so that they were smooth & had a gleaming shine.  

For his typical callers, they NEED that dogma because the imperfect dogma is WAY better than the plan that his callers often presently have in place (which is to say, NO plan, NO goals, NO hope, NO retirement, and taking on more consumer debt is all they are actually good at).

Its super easy to install and goes in very quickly if you're laying it over a flat surface with no imperfections. 

It avoids people looking at walls and finding little imperfections as when its staged your view isn't just up and down walls on the floor. 3.