Hoboken, I see that you have solved your problem in a lovely manner with the cafe height plantation shutters with 2.5 slats. This is what I have in my home, and I love them because we can still get the light, yet have full privacy when needed. Yours look great, BTW. I was going to suggest that if you were still wanting something more to “soften” the look of the windows, you could add a fixed fabric covered valance above the windows. You could place the top up at the ceiling height, and have the valance end right at the top of the window trim, thus not sacrificing any light coming in. What you’ve done thus far is just lovely.

I too, am interested in seeing a pic of a royal blue kitchen floor. And, out of curiosity, are the floors new or are you working around what came with the house? If the latter, I would definitely not base all the other decisions in my kitchen around the flooring. I would redo the flooring based on the style and color of cabinetry and counters that I would want, if it's a full reno anyway.

I used a similiar fabric for pillows with neutral cushions.

Because of the service agreement warranty, we must buy the replacement fridge from Sears. They offer 14 varied models in the French door dounterdepth style, from GE and LG (which we are considering) and Kenmore (which we aren't). Today I was baffled to learn that Sears recently discontinued the GE Cafe counterdepth French door model in stainless but kept it in black and a white door style (but only with an odd gold tone handle). My question now is how to address the annoying black/dark grey sides of the new stainless door fridges: 1. apply a stick-on wrap cover to simulate the stainless look of the door OR 2. rig some kind of white side panel to simulate the look of the complete cabinet enclosures that everyone is using these days in the white kitchens with stainless appliances (which we opted not to do originally because the skylight above the fridge made an over-fridge cabinet impractical) OR 3. find some other brilliant solution from the village!