Nice house! I think that golden oak and brass fixtures will soon make a comeback, because dark wood and silver/stainless have been popular for so long. I don't think the peachy wall color in your house looks good with the oak, though, because it makes the oak look so yellow. Before you paint the trim and window blinds, try painting the walls. Our walls are a pale khaki/green, so light it reads as a neutral, and it looks great with warm wood tones. I've also seen nice warm grays look good with golden wood. On the other hand, as much as I love wood, I think the bookshelves look odd in that spot, mostly because they appear to be floating above the baseboard heater. I think that would be the best wall for the TV, so you may have to change the shelves to make that work, or move/remove some of them. Can the dining room be closed off completely, with a big arched doorway? With such open space in the other rooms, it might be nice to have a more intimate space for contrast, and to have less sound bouncing around when you talk and laugh at the dinner table. Can the ceiling in that room be lowered? If not, I do like the grill idea suggested above for the openings to the DR. Lastly, before you shop for furniture I would make many copies of a to-scale floor plan and try moving little paper pieces of furniture around to make sure you can make it work before you buy it.

If you are in Pennsylvania, think about how many days a year the temp goes below 30. Why would you want to rely on an alternate heat system kicking in when you can have one consistent system? Heat pumps are terrible ideas, IMHO. They just can't keep up. I live in Va., and there are still homes/townhouses I've seen with heat pumps. Va has mild weather, but winters can get very cold (and have gotten colder the past several years). And I'll tell you, to most people, "heat pumps" on a home sale spec sheets is not a selling point--even if it is a Trane--they are installed as cheaper options; I have never seen anything claiming they were better utility wise or environmental wise (and I just replaced my non-heat pump heater with a regular Trane heater, so it's not like I'm being cheap!). It'd be worth your time and money to get another heating company rep in for an opinion and estimate.

Garland, Texas here, a suburb of Dallas. Been really hot and dry the past few weeks, and the past few days have been the hottest! Past two days around 104-105, and nights around 80 degrees. Definitely survival mode around here, and I water my garden every other day. Amazingly my cucumber are still producing! I keep picking a basketfull every few days and have given lots away. I am getting a few runts, but have had some nice sized ones too despite the heat. Yellow crookneck squash was producing good when it was between 98-100 for highs, but the past few days above 100 has pretty much shut them down. Okra loves the heat. 104 and they are happily producing. Have started given some away... Peppers are producing, but mostly they are ripening, since I think most of them set when the temps were in the upper 90s. I pulled up all my bush beans. The plants were surviving, but no beans anymore, except and occasional tiny runt bean. As Dan said, tomorrow we get a cold front, and temps are supposed to go back to normal, which is mid to upper 90s! Yeah big hats, shorts, lots of water! People pay money to go into a sauna and sweat buckets. I do it in my garden for free!

We have now looked at this property several times, and we have decided not to purchase it. We are looking at other options. We just decided that it was not to our liking. It was going to cost too much to update relative to the owner's price demands and there are better options in this range. One of us is currently very taken with a home built in the 50s that was gutted and added onto in the '90s and '00s. The finishes on it are much nicer.