Can the room outside bedroom [mudroom?] be narrowed? pushing banquette wall to the left..giving more sq footage around wood stove and seating there.You will want to be in this zone...eliminate longish side of banquette-clearing more floor space. Have some chairs handy if you need max seating at table. Better yet-hold off on banquette-get a local guy to build trestle/farm table if possible-push that in a bit so to be flexible with loveseat and 2 chairs you will want over by stove. Can you forgo peninsula? I'm not feelin it-and the stools will be used very little-people will migrate to the zone behind. Open it up there-no peninsula, then bank up 2 walls of kitchen facing each other with vintage look inset cabs with little latches and run narrow butcher/work table down middle of kitchen. More the style of your home. Can you center and widen opening into formal dining room-does it have "vintage" lurking in there? While using work surface down middle of kitchen, just turn and gaze in at the memories. Keep the kitchen basic-you have counter, freezer, etc in that back room.That seating area around stove is going to be greatly used...expand it if you can.

No, it's the one on the right. Different lighting and all that, I guess. I did not take the original photo of the samples. What we got did end up looking more like the very first sample I did see, in person. (Then we ordered, and the lots looked like the two in the photo in the first post.) So maybe the photo they took was a little washed out? Who knows.

I'd recommend staying away from the blue. We tried some blues with our stone. In the kitchen we had a light blue on the small wall area around the sink window and it was much better when we repainted to white. The stone has so many blues. Also the color of blue from the stone changes in a different way with light than the paint color does. That makes it really difficult to find a blue that goes with and enhances the stone. The blue paint just seemed to by trying to hard to match and not succeeding. On the other hand, the Fragrant Cloves warm reddish brown works well with the blues and references the rust tones in the stone. That is similar to the effect that we get with the natural cherry cabinets around our stone.

Erinct, I wasn't trying to lay down the rules of OT etiquette. To me the topic was in a grey area and I argued with myself a bit on whether to mark it OT or not. Sorry to hear about the poison ivy - that can be hard on the sufferer and his family. I hope he is feeling much better now. For textural and informal, someone had a fireplace with long thin stone kind of stacked on edge. To me, the pictures that you posted look pretty formal because of the style of the wood columns, mantle and, on the top one wall detail above the mantle. Here's our fireplace waiting for the surround Here is a close-up of the fireplace with a sample of the stone for the surround, cherry door (right material, but in the kitchen door style), and a piece of the maple flooring. We don't have a sample of the black stone that will be the hearth extension on the floor. Our surround will be pretty simple; just the stone covering the drywall under the mantle and a simple thick cherry mantle. The family room cabinet doors will be in this style, but natural cherry: