Budget/DIY kitchen upgrade Ideas/Opinions?

I've had a really hard time finding an article that lays everything out all in one place. I've noticed the how-to articles seem to be a little lacking.. for example how to put up a vapor barrier in your shower: 1. find studs 2. staple plastic on studs If anyone can point me to an article that goes from beginning to end what needs to happen to redo a shower, that would be awesome. Otherwise, I'm hoping I can get a few pointers from where we are. we pulled out the soggy drywall that the tile was falling off of and decided to get rid of the shower pan as well. We ordered a swanstone replacement and didn't even think that our standard sized pan would have the drain in a random not standard spot, but turns out measuring everything is super important and shouldn't be overlooked. we moved the drain. We put in the shower pan and it has a little flex in a few places, so we tried to do a mortar bed tonight, but it dried way to fast and got really hard really fast. we were able to get in back up with a putty knife, crow bar, and mallet, but it's not an experience we're hoping to repeat. we followed all the directions on the "quick drying" mortar except one. my boyfriend is convinced we need to dump the mortar into the water slowly while mixing and we ended up taking about 10 minutes to mix it although the directions say 1-3 minutes. I think we should just dump it in and mix. I think we added too much air while mixing, he thinks we should have just put in more water than the directions said. any tips? we're going to try again probably wednesday. next we are going to put up the 6 mil of plastic. i gather it is supposed to go to the top flange of the shower pan. do I start it at the drywall thats above where the tiles go? we have about 2 feet where we left the drywall above where we are tiling. I think we are going to overlap just a very little with the tile. also, what do I need to put around it where the shower valve pokes through? I think that covers it for right now. we are going to tackle tiling next weekend and I'm sure I'll have more questions.

We have be been planning to build a kitchen in basement. The dimension is 10.5' (126") wide and 8.5' (102") deep on left to open area as show in the following photo: The drain and water supplies are on the rear and to the right, so the sink will need to be on right rear corner. I'd like to put dishwasher in front of drain pipe so the clean out can be accessed if needed. We'd like to have granite counter tops, to reduce cost, I'd like to avoid 45 degree corners. To the left and rear are external walls, so the stove will like be on either left or rear. One of the possibility is shown as below to make counter top simpler. On the right lower corner are additional counter and refrigerator. Are there potential issue with this design? Thanks for any comment and suggestions?