FlowerLady here, and a bit freaked as several have said I would know what to do here. YIKES! I've been gardening on a shoe string for years. I grow natives, shrubs, annuals,perennials, roses, herbs. I live in the s.e. part of the state though. I have not been able to grow lavender here, except as an annual. It does not like the humidity. I love my roses, jasmine, cat's whiskers, moses in the bullrushes, basket plants, snake plants, ferns, plumeria, bougainvillea, crotons,plumbago, hibiscus, palms, succulents, Mexican heather, Mexican bush sage, Mexican petunias, chicory, elephant ears, aloe, flame vines, other flowering vines, orchids and many others. I grow from seeds and cuttings. I just mingle everything together for my own kind of tropical cottage garden. Visit the Florida Gardening forum here at GW. I'll leave a link at the bottom and you will get lots of great ideas for your part of the state. Check out what people are growing in your area also and look in garden centers. I love your house and think you will have lovely gardens once you are moved in and playing in the dirt. What are the little shrubs in your circular garden surrounding the palm tree? Whatever you do, don't stress, just have fun as your garden comes together. It's an ongoing process, something to enjoy every day. FlowerLady Here is a link that might be useful: Florida Gardening

At a loss here, folks! I'm terrible at visualizing and gave up on trying to sketch in colors myself on the Ben Moore or Sherm Williams websites. Would loooovveeee if someone out there could give it a whirl! Kindly seeking your suggestions for body and trim colors for this waterfront beach house in a New England fishing community. Neighboring home is brown cottage (see pic) and would love to somehow tie two homes together, but without making the main house brown. Most homes are weathered shingles..grey, dull. Would like to stay with light, warm colors...no yellows or blues. Thanks in advance.

What an adorable house! I grew up with those white frame houses with black trim, & to me, they always looked stark & maybe institutional. & this is what I thought when I was too young to know those words! I think with a pure white background, you can use pure clear colors like red, which is a great "country" color for houses, or deep cool pastels, like the gray you have now or maybe a deeper gray. Hunter green is also a traditional color for farmhouse trim, & it would play off the white white beautifully. I'm a fan of Behr paints from Home Depot, but a lot depends on your climate; we have lots of summer & you may have lots of winter or lots of salt spray. This forum's participants have a vast pool of experience a great willingness to share, so I'm sure somebody will give you expert advice on brand & type.

I’m going to disagree a little in that I don’t like houses where the interior is entirely unsympathetic to the exterior, or to the location. So with that in mind I’d try to identify features of the house you like (in our current 1930s foursquare, there is some lovely trim work) and try to make your choices play nicely with those features. This can be through color, or style, or proportion, it need not be copying exactly. If the house interior doesn’t have any features, then look to the style of the house and what people might consider ‘typical’ for that style, and pick things from there to work with. (For example, I think Scandanavian can play very nicely with some of the colors you’d typically think of being used in a Costal Cape Code, so you could probably do more Scandanavian style furniture but primarily use colors and wood tones that feel more coastal-Cape-Cod-y, like blues and grays. If you don’t like those colors then find something else about Coastal Cape Cod you can use as a guide when looking at which other style items you pick.) The idea is to get somewhere that looks like it isn’t fighting with the house, even though it’s not exactly what would be ‘typical’ for the house. Europeans sometimes do this very well with mixing very old and very modern, and there it tends to be down to colors/materials (so stuff doesn’t clash horribly with the older stuff) and proportions. That said, don’t forget that there are some rooms we do more expect to be ‘funky’ than others. So if you’re a little hesitant but want to go all out somewhere, then consider going wild either in private spaces like bedrooms (which most guests don’t see) or in the powder room if you have one - there’s definitely an idea that powder rooms can be the place you go a bit crazy because it’s so small and pretty boring otherwise. The powder room is where you often see people using more interesting wallpaper or tile (especially since you need less of it to do the room so you can go for more expensive stuff) or I knew someone who went a little Cherub crazy in hers and her whole powder room had an Italian old world feel with cherubs here and there - like cherub light switch plates, who knew? To be fair, I never saw her bedroom so maybe that was a bit wild too. :D (She was in general a collector - she had a TON of Santas and Santa stuff she brought out every year - so the cherub thing was something you went ‘okay, yeah, I can see this being a thing she would do.’ Which probably helped it work.)