Thank you so much, all, for the lovely compliments, I'm so glad you like it. We're pretty pleased, and the only thing we have that we simply could not fit in is a warming drawer, a Frigidaire scratch 'n dent special, so it wasn't expensive, but it's just sitting in the barn. Maybe I'll put it in CL, but I'm still delusionally holding out hope that I can find a way to use it. To answer your questions, the stuff hanging on the wall is mostly plastic (melamine, I think), the only exceptions are the fish on either side of the sink and one or two of the stuff on the wall over the slider door, they are hand painted ceramic. I know that TJ Maxx is routinely derided on this forum (for good reason), but most everything on the walls is from there, collected over a period of years, some of those pieces are over 15 years old. You can find good quality, unique pieces at the TJX company of stores, you just have to pick through and pounce when you see something you like. There are also several dollar store numbers up there, as well as a few vintage things. I am all about fun and colorful stuff, and while I try not to buy a lot of made in China stuff, I don't especially care about the retail provenance of things. Now to the questions. justgottabeme, below are a few more pics of our house, and I think I mis-typed, we're not almost done, I think that was wishful thinking, we're kinda, sorta almost done with the downstairs, we still have a whole bath and a lot of work in our 2 upstairs bedrooms... amysrq, thank you for the tip on the tile, I may look into it. We really wanted Marmoleum, but I damn near fell off my chair when we got the quote(of course, ahem, it was for a pattern with one of their cool edge treatments). The next day we were at an auction, this tile was there, I paid .25/foot, and we installed it. My first, and last, experience with tile outside of the bathroom, we detest it, it's too hard and cold for us. workinprogress08, I don't think the pears are pewter, they are some kind of milled metal (made in India), and they came from Marshall's (hem). I love pewter and brass and have a few vintage pieces of both, it's common to see them at my fav junque haunts, they aren't popular (at least in these parts), so the prices are excellent. I'm glad you liked the icefishing pic, it's funny, people fish all summer, but 10x as many fish in the winter. One of our dogs roams the ice looking for treats from friendly fishermen. She eats well out there. Here are some more pics of the main entrance and mud "area". We're too organizationally and house cleaningly challenged to have a mud room with a door, it would be a total disaster, so we created the mud area by our main entrance. The wall color is BM Med-evil Times (mixed in Aura matte), trim is BM Navajo Red (Aura semi-gloss) and the white is BM White Marigold (Aura matte). The stuff on the walls is mostly from our local junque shops. Looking from the kitchen: From kitchen, looking up the stairs (just fixed the nail pops, gotta touch the White Marigold, yikes!: Coat areas (yup, we have two), the shelving unit is part of a display, painted in BM Buttered Yam (Aura, semi-gloss): Bench (CL special): Looking down: Yes, that is laundry drying, we have 2 indoor lines set up: Message center (metal office thing, came from Kodak in Rochester, NY, free from my cuz): Entry way to kitchen: Cabs are BM Bainbridge Blue (Aura semi-gloss): My poor topless range, someday I'll get her a lid: What she really needs is a nice Modernaire, but mr. sandyponder won't let me sell the kid: More cabs: Bainbridge Blue outside and Med-Evil Times inside: OK, I think I have bored you all enough for one post. Of course the kitchen isn't done yet, but the entryway mostly is...one small victory. sandyponder

HBK, thank you for that link. I had not seen it. It seems that gumwood was very popular in the twenties when our house was built but then it fell out of favor. People took it out of their houses or painted over it. We were lucky to have purchased the house out of the estate of the original owners, and nothing had been repainted or changed in any way. Gumwood is still grown but as we learned, the new gumwood is often too different from the old gumwood for them to be used side by side. When it is sanded but unfinished it has a very pale pinkish grey color. When you apply mineral spirits or Waterlox, it immediately turns that butternut kind of color with unpredictable dark streaks. We have gumwood all throughout the house. In the "formal" rooms it is stained dark to look like walnut. deedles, we did choose everything ourselves -- no KD -- just DH and me, with a professional tile installer. The floor tiles are from Seneca Tile in Ohio. None of the cabinets are standard sizes. We basically took all the old cabinets apart and reconfigured/rebuilt them to fit our space and the appliances. The doors that we had just filled the space to fit with a 30 inch range, which is one of several reasons we went with the 30 inch. (We could have resized all the doors but a 30 inch seemed large enough for our use, the space, and seemed like it would be more like something that would have been available in the twenties). I just thought the 30 inch Blue Star was appealing, with its five symmetrically placed knobs and the design of the center grate. The kitchen is about 13 feet square -- not very big by contemporary standards but actually quite large by comparison with similar houses of the era.

Les you got that right! I forgot to leave a place for the broom/vacuum etc when we did the kitchen ...what was I thinking ?? I had to reconfigure a small closet by taking out the shelves in the lower part and making room for the broom etc. Then I had no place for this stuff that was close to the kitchen. Luckily I found this cabinet. It is quite sturdy and now that it is clean I love it ! I wish I was creative and could do painting on it like Oceanna has shown....in another life I guess LOL. I am thinking maybe a stencil of some sort. We'll see. Thanks for the compliment, coming from you it means LOTS. c

In a previous house I had a cabinet that became more useful with rollout shelves. However, since the cabinet was framed, then I lost the storage on the edges on both sides due to the rollouts. In my current/for sale house I have the luxury of a walk-in pantry with deep shelves on one side (my appliance parking structure) and a reach-in with swing-out shelves as cluelessincolorado shows: maybe yours could be different, but mine swing together so closely that it's difficult to reach between to get something at the back of the shelves behind, and the depth of the swing-outs preclude many things from fitting there (I use my quite old Tupperware fitting sidewise for sugar, flour etc). In my new-to-me house I have a closet pantry with U-shaped shelves and little spice-type shelves on the door itself. A PO put in the door shelves. While I miss the sheer volume of the walk-in and swing-out pantries, this house is half the size and less than a mile to a grocery (yippee!) so I don't require as much storage either. The U-shape shelves let me see everything and I put tall bottles in a crate. This picture shows the PO's things. hth