Our dog is white and sheds like crazy. We have a cherry like tone in most of our house though one room is like the pickled oak color in your pics. The hair is far less visible on the pickled oak floor even though it is the floor with the least striations. I actually think that more variations and striation does not help to hide because it is usually darker tones that create the striation and also show hair more. I got a crappy bissell pet hair vacuum. It doesn't work great but is super light weight and I use it between visits from our house cleaner. I have a pretty large three story house and twice a week I scoot through it in about five minutes with the pet vac, a not very careful or thorough vacuuming at all but it still makes a huge difference!

Those countertops are tough. I don't care for either paint color in your photos but but original is definitely better than the Sea Salt. I like pink and grey together, though - have you considered playing up the pink with accessories and painting the walls a very pale, crisp true grey? I'm not familiar with all the brands and colors like some of the experts here, but Benjamin Moore Greytint or Grey Cashmere might work, or Sherwin William's Passive.

jjj, thanks for the location. You are in what used to be called the transition zone, but with the Earth warming, I think you're not going to be able to grow the cool season grasses there much longer. I might have suggested a ground cover, but having the drip line right there has my focus. I have mulch and cinder blocks under my drip line. The mulch looks pounded, but at least it's still there. Soil would have washed away even if it had grass to break the fall. I should try to get a picture of how that looks. But as far as I know we're sticking with mulch there. Gardengal is a believer in full surround gutters.

Do consider that you are going to be waiting a long time for a 6' tree planted even as close as the center of one of your lawns to provide any significant amount of screening or shading of the house. But which particular window are you thinking about? A tree lined up just right with one of them and planted close enough could provide an adequate level of screening pretty quickly - maybe even immediately if of the right size and shape. With it also casting a moving shadow over part of the house some day. Otherwise you could block the street with solid fencing and/or hedging/screening plantings consisting of or including dense shrubby kinds. Usually river birch is not affected by bronze birch borer, with up here anyway it being the European, Himalayan and paper birches that are being hit now that the pest has come this far west. For instance the next door neighbors to a friend that lived near Seattle had two cut leaf weeping European birches and one river birch in their back yard. When the borer came to their neighborhood the European birches were being drilling out and dropping branches on his side of the fence in no time. Luckily the neighbors were quick to have these cut down. Providing in addition a much better view of the river birch, which as of the last time I was on the friend's property was still standing there looking intact.