Thank you all, for your continued kind words. Campanula, yes, exactly. Setting the garden (and home) within the larger context is always the tricky thing, right? Like, on one hand you want to have your way over the landscape, to tame it and mold it into more of what you like. But on the other hand, the cues really need to come from what's already around you otherwise it's either going to be a ton or work to fight nature, and/or it won't even look right when you're done. So the rock theme really plays well here. GreenHearted, that's a great question. I have done the foundation differently on different stone projects here. I'm not an expert on this, but none of my walls have fallen down yet! (With the older ones being over 10 years old.) You are quite right, a dry-stacked wall is an inherently flexible structure and is very forgiving of expansion and contraction of the ground. On this wall, I dug/scraped down to the subsoil layer, which is a very compacted, concrete-like substance. I didn't put down gravel or anything, mostly because the very idea of that pushed the project into the realm of unrealistic for my diy self. Stonework does have a tendency to slowly sink into the ground. Rocks that used to be standing above grade are now below the level of the grass. I'm not sure how much a gravel foundation would help that. One of my walls has a gravel foundation and it hasn't behaved any differently than the others as far as I can tell. Not sure if that answer helps or not! :)

I had to read this thread again and your thought process until you figured out with the help of suggestions on how to update your kitchen and keep your quality oak cabinets. The transformation is very nice! I love the changes. This post was edited by lynn2006 on Sun, Jul 13, 14 at 0:39

I'm in my 30s with two little kids and another on the way. I typically despise most light wood cabinets - often see them with the raised panels and they just look kind of cheap - but yours are actually really cool and I don't mind them at all. I wouldn't want to see your cabinets painted, and I'm normally totally in favor of painting wood cabinets! Please don't waste any money on painting them. Your house looks very beige to me, particularly the bathroom. I don't think painting things gray will help because I think it won't look great with all the tan beigey stuff. So "de-beige-ing" the house might help if you can find the right shade to tone it down. I don't mind your sofas, but not a fan of the brown rug in the living room. The house looks clean and nice, however. The layout issue would be a huge turnoff for me. I have friends who have purchased homes with similar layouts (master bedroom on a separate floor from kids' bedrooms) and they just used a regular bedroom as their master and the other bedroom became a playroom or guest room. If you're looking to market to families, then making the top floor a playroom could work. I don't know what the rest of the property is like (yard, etc) or what the neighborhood is like, but staging a better layout could certainly help. If you're looking at comps for your home, but these homes don't have the layout issue, then they're not good comps.

I guess I should have clarified that I want to make the entire house more modern... 2006 paint colors and medieval light fixtures gone, laz boy type sofas, etc. 😁 But I also see the point that while we can make the house more modern, we won’t be able to completely remove the more traditional or lodge-y elements.