I agree that the liriope (Lilyturf) would look very nice with your gardenia. If you aren't looking for year-round foliage then grape hyacinths are also very very cute and smell heavenly in the early spring. They are so dependable too! (Can you tell I'm biased, I have them growing around my gardenia at the front door). You could also interplant the grape hyacinths with the lilyturf... I don't think Society Garlic repels anything, it's not a garlic but a plant of the amaryllis family.

Haahahahaa! Karen this is SO funny. I'm bursting into laughter reading these posts again, and remembering writing and reading them at the time. Well done! And my favourite part about Martha Stewart dropping in with her dish towel parachute!!! WAY too funny!

Sorry, guys, Thanksgiving got a little busier than I thought. First it was just going to be the two of us, then three, then five, then seven, and hosting another dinner tonight. Whew! If I could get that many people to come and look at my house every day or two, it would probably be sold by now, lol. And yes, I have removed the plant stand, and the shelves next to the desk, and photos and art, and other lah-di-dahs. I did repair the pass through. I found new nightstands for the blue bedroom too -- and purchased a more colorful shower curtain and new towels. Most of the pictures in the listing are old ones. I do not understand why our Realtor didn't take them down (along with the cat box photo) when the new pictures were taken. In my her defense: She really is the best one in town. She has more listings and more sales than anyone else. She's been doing it longer. She is extraordinarily personable and between her large extended family and her other affiliations, she is very well connected in the area. I think she knows the market too, at least here. I do think her agency is behind the times on technology -- but no more so than other real estate firms in our part of the state. As for the photos, yeah, I think most of them don't do much to entice buyers - but I have to defend her in that too. Our pictures are actually better than a lot of others I've seen. For instance, in the listing for the most expensive home for sale in our area every single photo is blurry and pixelated. And then there's the one I'm linking. At $147,000, it is in the above average price range for our town. It's in a nice newer development. I understand that a Realtor can't work miracles; they can only sell what is for sale ... but really? They couldn't move the vaccuum cleaner, the can of Lysol or the roll of toilet paper? I'm not saying you guys are wrong, just that things are different here. If I give our Realtor very specific instructions about which photos to keep and which ones to ditch - she will do as I ask. She might secretly roll her eyes and swear under her breath about 'big city ways', but she'll do it. So thank you, thank you for taking the time to provide your opinions and guidance. I'll let you know if traffic picks up. Here is a link that might be useful: How People Sell Homes in Fly Over Country

I know it's discouraging when your picks get criticized. And the last thing I want is for someone's vision for their kitchen to get nitpicked down into the lowest common denominator of "safe" choices. So before I say what I think, I want to ask, what is YOUR vision for this kitchen? I don't mean specific choices, but what kind of overall look you want to achieve. Can you post some inspiration pics? I ask this, because I really can't tell where you are going based on your choices. The floor is quite rustic, the cabinets are solidly transitional, and I would probably put the counter in that category as well. Both backsplashes, this one and the one in the previous thread, are quite modern. I think you can choose two of the three (modern, transitional, rustic), but trying to include all three is to make your kitchen elements fight with each other. I think that is why people's reactions have been negative. It's not that they don't like the individual elements, its that they don't pull together for a cohesive design. I liked the backsplash in your previous thread much better than this one. Mosaic tile, in my opinion based on about a zillion pictures of kitchen that have them, are really hard to get right. They have so much going on that they don't brook any competition from the other elements in the kitchen. You need a very low-pattern counter, and they are better with slab-front cabinets. With your choices, all three of the cabinet, counter, and floor will fight with the mosaic to some extent. In the previous thread, Anglophilia was the odd-person out for calling out your cabinet choice as the problem. If you really want a modern looking backspash, then I'm going to agree. Replace the orange-toned shaker with a slab door with a cooler, darker stain that plays well with the floor color and I think it could work with the old backsplash choice. If you want to keep the floors and cabinets, I'd still tone down the orange in the cabinet a bit to work better with the floor (or warm up the color of the floor to play better with the cabinet), but I'd choose a rustic or transitional backsplash. Both of your counter choices look fine with the floor and the cabinets, and with the earlier backsplash. I don't like either with the current backsplash choice because the mosaic tile works best with a solid-color (or close to it) counter. Try not to get discouraged!