rmkitchen, that tile floor is beautiful! It reminds me of the tile in my basement but mine isn't all of those wonderful colors. Mine is whitish with maroon and almost forest green design. I'm not sure what type of tile I have but have thought it might be redondo because there is some that in the older homes in our area. I've never heard of encaustic. Well never mind. Wikipedia says redondo and encaustic are the same thing. Your floor will be worth the wait! My favorite decor decision of 2010 was deciding to just go for it. We remodeled the main bathroom and reconfigured all of the closets in the house to make it larger. We also converted a former porch being used as a sewing/junk room into an additional bathroom. I love them and I gained better flow and more closet space. Now we have a 3BR/3BA house and our square footage didn't change but it seems much larger. Big cheer to my contractor who is a design genius. Another decision was to repaint the rest of the house. Inside and out. My neighbor hugged me with joy when I told I was painting the brick even though my husband still didn't want to. After all the positive comments from neighbors and people we don't even know he got over it soon enough. After 17 years I finally feel like our house is a home and something to be proud of.

...flipping the dining room with the living room. We have a 1960 two-level ranch with a central fireplace between the LR and DR. The DR is a small space, so we turned that into a comfortable sitting room and put the DR in the LR space. Now, we have the fireplace, room for the inherited corner cupboard made by my great-great=grandfather around 1850, an old highboy chest, drop leaf table as sideboard, table that will seat 8-12, and two wing chairs-all without looking crowded. Also, turning the downstairs family room into a library with cherry bookshelves covering two walls, fireplace, and chintz upholstery on the couch. It is very cozy down there. Elsewhere, every upholstered piece is covered with sheets-lol, bumlebeez-glad we aren't the only ones! No worries any more-it's just stuff.

My vote is not to tile above the window. I know that tiling all the way up to the ceiling and around the window is on trend right now, and industrial-inspired look that also harkens back to the fully-tiled kitchens of the 1920s (at least hear in the mid-Atlantic where I live) But I don't think tiling all the way up is the right choice for your kitchen. I also think it is nice to have some wall for paint, something that can be changed more easily over the years than tile.

robin, Thanks for letting me know the floors are oak laminate. It amazes me that I keep liking oak floors when I too had been dead set against oak floors due to not liking my veneer oak cabinets that came with my townhouse and this cheap oak engineered wood floors in the foyers that have very thick coarse grain in them that is very busy. Maybe I would even be open to an engineered oak floor that is not too grainy that is stained cherry. I also am still open to laminate but due to my cherry furniture in my office, I had my heart set on a cherry wood floor with tiled foyers. I just wish my foyers were bigger but I live in North Jersey and as single person needing a lot of square footage to have a big home office as well as lots of personal space, the stylish townhouse fit me better. If I sold my townhouse and moved south, I could get a really nice house with a big beautiful foyer but I am realizing being alone, I am not yet ready to move with my clients here an my clients are so nice. The location I live in is expensive and I chose this townhouse over the house with more land and more bedrooms that was the same price due to the location not appealing to me. Thanks also Robin for letting me know the paint color. It truly is very neutral and may be nice in my home office to warm up the walls. I will try a sample out when I am ready to repaint. I love all my window treatments in my home I chose except for my first choice that is in the home office. I dislike the long strings of my Alta (a division of Hunter Douglas) double honeycomb blinds since they are always messy and tangling. I dislike the neutral color I chose (an off-white with a taupe faint design in it that looks great in the day time) at night since the blinds then appear gray. I wish I went with the 3/4" size pleat rather than the 1/2" size pleat. But I did not make these mistakes again and I learned that it is worth paying a little more for retractable cords or continuous loop cords or going cordless if you are tall (I am not). When you are ready for blinds, let me know and I will take pics of my other window treatments that I love especially my Champaign colored Shangri-La sheer horizontal blinds in my family room that has a cathedral ceiling and a wall of windows. The blinds really make the room so bright and happy and goes so well with the Bone White walls and bright white trim. Everyone who sees them loves them. I also love my retractable corded top-down bottom up Architella black-out Duet blinds in the linen color in my bedroom softened up with crinkled soft white sheers around them.