Sounds good to me, Les!! I will try it. I really like the idea of the mirror horizontally. Then I can put up my collection of soon to be framed lace on the other wall with maybe a few of my china mixed in. I have always allowed my DH help me decorate = masculine. This is MY room. He has a very "manly" den with TV. I come in here to read or just "veg out." I am trying to surround myself with things that I love in this room. Auntjen, I guess I will hang out with the spirits that be in this room!! I think they are in my foyer, too!! Hope they are friendly:) Smiles:)

It might not be exactly what you expected, but calm wood floors have a lot more leeway than other elements in a room. Especially dark floors. They tend to just go neutral on you. Seriously, whens the last time you looked at a garden and said great flowers and foilage, but the dirt color is wrong? As long as you stay away from dyed red/orange mulch (a bad rug?), I think you're fine. ;-) When everything else is in the room, I think that's what you'll be seeing -- the flowers and foilage.

I think, after talking to the granite people.. I am going to take a piece of your advice, Rachel. We cannot do laminate. The house would lose value in the final appraisal and that would mean less budget (has to appraise high or we end up having to put a larger down payment which defeats the purpose). But.. I spoke with my wife and looked at a lot of the choices online at the granite place that will be doing the counters. Instead of upgrading the backsplash to mosaic.. we will pick a backsplash tile that is a subway til and as close to what we like. There is not markup costs for that. Then, look at ALL the choices of granite inside out budget and spend a little extra getting a leather texture. The honed is going to rack up the price so.. we will hold off on that and merely try to avoid the glare of the polished for now. That would be a minor upgrade. We can keep that for a few years and save up the money to get the granite we really like how we like it. Who knows, maybe we will grow to like what we get now... but the important part is the cabinets and we add our budget increases into that. There is no way we could do the floors right now as it would cost 2-3 times the amount of the kitchen modifications. To swap carpeted area to tile or laminate is like $5 per sq ft and almost the entire downstairs was carpeted before so.. that is totally out of the budget so we are staying with the stained concrete for now. It is a LOT cheaper to do that after the fact than right now. Thanks for the ideas! Russ

#1 Yes #2 Probably #3 Probably not Obviously based on the way colors look on my computer. I like the segue into something a little more modern/tribal from the more traditional flanking rugs - you are pulling this together really well.