Nothing wrong with white oak - I love the stuff, especially if it is quarter sawn. Quarter-sawn white oak has interesting rays in the grain like that found in old English oak. The link shows a photo, I know nothing about the website and it is not an endorsement. Here is a link that might be useful: Photo

Kees_Lover, Thank you for sharing your landscape prints framed showing me so many different ways a picture can be framed and look nice. I really do appreciate all the helpful people on this decorating site. I am now thinking that I like my print despite how much green it has so I have to decide on a frame. I will try to take pictures tomorrow. My sofa and recliner are called taupe but to me is a leather by Natuzzi that is more on the beige taupe side and is very neutral but does not like gold frames and since I have two glass lamps with chrome bases and chrome filaments on top of the very white shades on the glass tables next to the sofa and a triangle glass table in front with the green glass edging, BM Bone White Walls, White baseboard molding and Brazilian Cherry Floors, I am wondering if a Bronze frame will go or will it clash with the sofa or the chrome? Bronze is more of a brown right? I also like a brown espresso very ornate frame but I wonder if it would be too dark. My picture if of Japanese Maple trees with dark Pine Trees and some other lighter green trees and some trees with orange and yellow but the green dominates with red the second color. There is a bridge and a green pond probably from algae. My room needs some color so bad and I wish I had chosen a dark brown or Mahogany sofa and not taupe years ago since it took me a year to buy some furniture when I bought my first home. Do you think a 40"X 30"size print would be good that will get bigger with a mat and frame for an 81" long sofa? I never bought pictures before except for the small framed prints in 2007 from JCPenney. I went there and they have no more framed prints for sale in their store.

Shoot, I didn't think you even had to heat in zone 8! I'm a chilly zone 4 (northern NY) and our only sources of heat are a woodstove and a pellet stove, so I have a little (LOL) experience with stoves. Before you get to decoration, though, you have to consider protection of combustible surfaces. You woodstove's manual will give you the minumum clearances between the back of the stove and the nearest adjacent walls. It's particularly important in the case of corner installations since the heat can get trapped in the angle. Please don't fudge these requirements. Some people think that if they apply a non-combustible surfacing to the wall then these distances don't matter. That's wrong, they still do because the noncombustible material will just transfer the heat to the (now) hidden combustible material behind. And then you've got Trouble. There are ways to reduce these distances (in some cases, see your manual for details) be using shield plates behind (and sometimes below) the stove and all the way up the back of the stovepipe to the thimble. To further reduce the distance, with some stoves, you can apply additional protection to the combustible surface by mounting a sheild about 1" off the wall, open on the top and bottom. We use a piece of cement board held off the wall with porcelain electric fence insulators centered on long screws. If you do a good job of countersinking the screws you can easily tile over the cement board, though this makes it impossible to remove it without destroying it. You can also paint it. Underneath the stove, you need to protect any combustible flooring and most wood stoves have a minimum size pad of non-cumbustible material to catch sparks and other debris. The simplest floor is a just a big, flat, rock slab like bluestone, granite, slate, or soapstone. My woodstove "hearth", really just a pad is made of (from the top surface): common bricks on edge over insulation board, laid over a bed of play sand contained in heavy plastic, then the wood floor. All surrounded by a an ogee-shaped moulding. The reason for the sand is that the hearth crosses the sill where two different buildings adjoin and the finish floor slopes more than two inches. Such are the joys of living in a very old house: floors you could ski down. If you're thinking of a wooden mantle, you may need a curved heat shield underneath it to protect the bottom surface - depends on how high it is off the top of the stove. That's why I prefer stone or rock mantles - they can't scorth! HTH, Molly~

This weekend, in southwestern Ontario was our annual air show. We had fighter jets from the world wars, and the Snowbird aerobatics, and parachuters. Here are the snowbirds......they were so fast, we hardly got any pics. And a very cool heart formation, made with 3 planes. It was disappearing before hubs could get the camera focusted.