Ground cover is, I agree, appropriate to many situations. Prolly not to this one, though, given the OP's concern about his lawn. (He'll likely have to give up having any gorgeous grass in that sideyard.) Whether water is precious depends on where you are. Dallas? Yes. BUT...you don't need St. Augustine in Dallas. All hail Bermuda grass there! Houston? Rarely is there a drought severe enough to cause a temporary water concern. As for there, St. Augustine or "stickers" are your choices. Mobile, AL, is another place that needs St. Augustine. And rain? Try the rainiest city in the lower 48! Different regions have different concerns--some have water concerns, while fertilizer runoff is a lot more troublesome in others. (Apparently, the strawberries that annoy me so in my grass? A noxious invasive exotic. Great. Suggestions for getting rid of them or even controlling them? Pretty darned feeble, as far as I can tell.) Trying to nurse a lawn that won't ever do very well into a state of verdant, glowing health is going to do a lot more damage than watering a lawn up to two times a week in August in many places. 1" per week *includes* natural rainfall and only applies to the growing season, BTW. Areas that need St. Augustine that I've lived in have ranged from 36 to more than 40 inches of rain per year, on average. That's not much water. It's less than I had to put on my "xeric" plants in NM while they were getting established. (You should have seen me panicking when I first planted them and they started to wither even though I was watering them, in my mind, "all the time"--meaning once a week. *snort* Yes, in a high-wind, high-elevation, semi-desert environment!) I am ALL for choosing a low-maintenance ground cover--*where it works*. I haven't found a single satisfactory replacement for a lawn for kids to play on. I've looked. "Light to medium foot traffic" groundcovers won't do it, though goodness knows I wish they would. And many people live in areas in which replacing a "merely decorative" front yard is either culturally unacceptable--take that as you will--or is actually explicitly restricted by covenants or zoning laws. And that's assuming that the OWNERS like them. In those cases, the best you can do is make large beds which you can try to make as low-maintenance as possible. (Honestly, for 9/10ths or more of people, high maintenance is a bad idea from any standpoint, anyway. Vacations, boredom, illness, business--all of these things would intervene in a strict routine of trimming, spraying, fertilizing, etc., etc., to such an extent that the landscape would soon look pretty pathetic. And so often does! I am WAY too lazy to do that and bitterly, bitterly disappointed that I'll have to water the slope in back next year at least four times to keep back that $%# crab grass.) As for Lyme disease--I'd rather not have my kids--or the neighbors' kids--get it by playing in my yard. I can check myself after going out. I can trust other adults to do it, too. Stripping down elementary schoolers every time they go outside--and in summer, they're banging in and out all the time--is practically insane, but it was the only alternative to treating the 1/8th of an acre that's the major play area last year. We had started averaging, literally, a tick a week. I looked up the incidence of tick-borne diseases in our area, and the statistics were NOT good. Now, I hate using pesticides. This was the first time that I'd personally applied them. I'm killing all sorts of critters I'd LOVE to have in my back yard, but if it's that or a sick kid, I'm grabbing my bag of pesticide. Of course, I COULD just keep the deer out somehow. If you can suggest an effective and economical way of keeping deer out of a 2-acre spread, part of which is wetland, please do! *g* I mean really, I'd love to know, 'cuz I have an azalea that's looking bedraggled nearly 2 years after some young buck decided that it was an all-you-can-eat salad bar for several week running. I have another question, though, purely hypothetical at this point. In one area I lived in, we wouldn't get a hard freeze once every four years or so. And in those years, no matter how we treated the dogs (pills, sprays, collars, what-have-you), they would bring in hundreds of fleas--dozens with every trip outside--that would set up home and eat people and pets constantly. The dogs went piebald with scratching, and we were covered in bites. How can you get rid of fleas at that level of infestation without using a pesticide? We did every de-flea-your-house trick known to man, BTW, from vacuuming more than once a day to the dust that dessicates them. After going through every other option the first year, my dad (who, BTW, has a master's degree in a wildlife field!) broke down and went the poison-the-yard route--which worked beautifully, knocking back the numbers hard enough that bites were rare rather than constant. I do want to makes a BIG point about using "organics." Raw sewage is organic. It is also devastating to the environment. Soooo many gardeners like to make a big point about how they only use ORGANIC compost/worm castings/whatever on their plants. The streams really. don't. care. whether the nitrogen that gets dumped in them from your/my garden is from 100% certified premium organic sources or from cheapo-granulated nitrogen pellets. It doesn't make a difference! I like compost for all sorts of reasons, including reduced runoff and reduced chances of burning a plant because of slower release. But I don't pretend that there's "good organic nitrogen" and "bad inorganic nitrogen"--once it runs off, it's just plain ol' nitrogen. Sorry for sounding condescending--it was meant to be a drawl. ;-)

Depends on what type of white that you want. If you want a crisp white w/ no undertones of any color but is still rich, bright and vibrant w/o being cold I'd highly recommend SW High Reflectance White. The paint guy described it as pure white w/ extra 'oomph'. I recommend viewing the chip on the SW white collection handout. You can see how it stands out amongst all of the other whites. SW HRF is typically used as a base to add other tints to. Since there are no tints this color picks up and reflects back large blocks of other colors quite easily. I hated it in my hallway where it turned pink becuase of my stained glass window. I love it in my office becuase there are no other outside color influences - just blues in the form of flowers and pillows. Here it is in my office. I chose it for this room becuase I wanted the wall color to stand out and hold it's own combined w/ all of the black and white.: Here is SW Pure White in my LR at one point which has a NE exposure and low light. I had a hard time getting the right white becuase of all of the green foliage outside of the window. This was just a very soft white w/ no yellow or creamy tones. Really liked it a lot! Please don't judge me on the sad silk floral whatever in the vases - I was just trying to visually figure something out!:

I think the room is bright and light. It is nicely done. I am not a fan of ceiling fans. We installed them when we built because it was the most economical and a quick decision to make. I have removed all of them. I rarely use an overhead light for a task at hand....Just to enter the room if I need lighting. I think a decorative light would look nice and soften the light in the room. They are my jewelry for the room.

Thank you Heather! You have been really helpful. I am going with an electric oven and the side warming cabinet. I bake a lot, especially breads. When I make my breakfasts, I usually need something (oven) to keep bacon, potato's etc warm. I'm also finding, that because my husband is now working from home (I recently retired :) ) that keeping food warm for him is nice too. He's usually has conference calls that can keep him from a hot meal I've cooked. I'm keeping my Decor wall oven so will have access to two electric ovens. But having a small space to keep things warm should work pretty well. So, I'm excited to get this stove ordered. We will have to do a small remodel in our kitchen, new farmhouse sink and repositioning some existing cabinets. Yes, we are going to probably have to do something creative with the hood as well since the stove is a off measurement of 43".