actually Poplar when stained looks very much like cherry for a fraction of the price. I would try and select the boards without a lot of the green colored grain to it. I would also recommend using a wood conditioner prior to staining as well.

The only negative affect of going all white except for the outside trim, is that the combination will highlight the fact that your trim is the bare minimum. Personally I don't think this is a big deal. I don't think anyone is going to walk in your house and be struck by the fact that you have thin trim. Surely there will be nicer things in the room to draw attention away from the trim.

I've also painted old stained trim with no regrets. I did not strip it all (tried at first, but it was very aged and too difficult even with chemical strippers and heat guns!)- I simply sanded and used high quality Ben Moore primer and paint with excellent results. I personally much prefer white-painted trim to stained, UNLESS the house is of unusually high build quality. I come from a family of architects so am probably a bit overly-sensitive to proportion and design, so YMMV... but I feel like stained trim really calls attention to each element: doors, windows, baseboards, crown moldings are all brought into high contrast with stain and their placement and proportions become important design elements in a room. If they were well and thoughfully designed originally, that can be a beautiful thing. If not -I'd paint them. Our last house was a 1926 Foursquare. it was definitely much better built than most homes today, however, it was probably a Sears kit house originally, basically a builder-home from that era. i.e. not architect-designed like the previous Victorian I'd lived in. It had stained fir trim (with nice details) throughout, and DH and our friends thought I was crazy to paint it. Guess what? The house looked SOOO much better after I did. It actually became a much classier-looking house. The dark wood around doors and windows -which had been placed pragmatically rather than for aesthetics- made the house seem a bit akward. The white paint allowed the really GREAT elements in the house, like it's gorgeous birch floors, ample sunlight and great "flow", to really shine. Just my 2 cents!

plllog - the windows outside of our kitchen are stained. does that change your opinion? artemis78 - good eye! yes, that is an angled frameless cabinet. we chose frameless for the base cabinets b/c (1) they were cheaper, and (2) they can hold more stuff than inset base cabinets. since the wall cabinets are what is at eye level, we went inset for those. and we chose an angled cabinet b/c of our goofy kitchen configuration where the counters stick out on the other side of the wall (we have a small galley kitchen), so the angled cabinet would give more walk-thru space. i know angled cabs are not exactly period in our 1908 house but for that area, we went with practicality over authenticity. bickybee - i was afraid you'd say that. it's tough to find a good, solid oak stained door. we tried to strip the paint once before and the door just looked terrible. so tough!