Your most "bang for the buck" solution would be paint. Take a door to a good paint store, not a big box with a paint department. They will be able to advise you about pretreating, primers and finish paint that will give you a good job on your particular cupboards. Polyshades will not lighten the cabinets, but it could be used to darken them. Strip and refinish may be possible, but it is a huge amount of work. If the cupboards are veneer, it will be almost impossible to strip them carefully enough to not damage the finish and still get a good result.

joanie_b, the finish at the top of the paneling is the same as the trim around the doors - just a basic 2" door trim with the thicker flat edge of the trim facing up. It's not your standard chair rail trim which is more streamlined. One thing I forgot to mention is that the room gets very little natural light. The windows at the den end of the room face east and there is a front porch there, so no direct sunlight after about 9 AM. The door with windows leads out onto a screened porch. So it is a pretty dark room. Thanks, everyone, for your good ideas. Three options are emerging: 1) paint it white to match the doors, 2) paint it the same color as the walls, which will eventually be a warm beige-SW Sand Dollar which I have in adjacent rooms and 3) paint it a softer white color. It is a ridged paneling (varied widths of ridges) so it would look similar to beadboard if painted. I'm going to paint the walls next week and once painted, I'll get some poster board and try the wall color and whites and see what looks good.

Are you saying you want to replace the existing shingles with more horizontal siding? If you replicate the existing siding it will look too uniform and boring in my opinion. And if you don't replicate the existing siding, using a different reveal, the two different but similar styles would look clumsy. I would keep the shingles, they are a nice feature, but I find the contrast between the bright blue siding and natural wood to be a little jarring. If I kept them I would either consider a nature like color for the siding that is more compatible with the wood or paint the shingles in a color complimentary to your siding color. I completely agree with Yardvaark, your two little rows of pavers are not wide enough and if they aren't exactly straight and level it's not going to look good. Making thin, relatively small pavers level means a lot of work on the base underneath them, just laying them on the dirt won't do it. I can appreciate the desire to save money but I would pay a concrete contractor to cast in place some much larger pavers for such an important part of your landscape. They would be geometrically precise, more stable, easier to walk on and would provide the right proportion and scale for your entry. It's a nice looking house, good luck.

Thanks Tigereye. I'll raise you again. Deer, Antelope, Fish, Fox, Racoon, Coyote, and a Rattlesnake in a skull (his most prized trophy). I thought my husband was going to cry when our Realtor in Kansas City told him he was going to have to take them down before we put the house on the market. We sold our home in a golf course community in KC to my husband's dream property in the mountains of SE Oklahoma where all you hear at night is the sound of banjos playing. The house was not only 1/3 the size of what I had, it was a total disaster. To find a good interior decorator, I would have to go to Tulsa, OKC, or Dallas which are all 3 hours away. This has been my first time seeking advice on Houzz and I am impressed with all the great suggestions given. I just wish I had found this site 9 years ago, it would have saved me from making some pretty dumb and costly mistakes. Hope you all don't mind if I buzz you again down the road when I tackle my next project. Thanks again, everyone!