I will be putting a desk area in my kitchen for the same reason -- we need a place to drop off phones, keys, mail, etc. Don't we all need some sort of dumping ground? Our previous kitchen didn't have one, so we always had a messy little spot of counter with that stuff. Now we will have a dedicated place for charging, with a few drawers for items like paper clips, rubber bands, envelopes, stamps, and other detritus. It won't sit in the main part of the kitchen any more! Also, I love how you handles the ceilings -- we will be doing something similar to disguise a beam.

Mike, thank you! I do indeed have a picture or 5 or 6 from my back deck. But you must promise not to laugh. I have gardened for a long time -- but in the back of a big brick colonial in full sun. After 10 years I had a really lovely Southern garden built around a pretty carefully curated collection of ~150 roses, from Old Blush on up through the ages. The old teas and noisettes were my favorites. THAT was maintenance, LOL. But just as you note, that was also about (ever expanding) beds,... Life changes and now I am single again, caring for a very sick mother who lives with me, communing to work in Philadelphia, trying to rehab a house and learning to garden in a new way. I mention all this to beg a little bit of a pass on my unimpressive results to date -- its hard to find time to study and learn! That said, what time I do have is devoted not to trips to the tile store, but to this -- there's an image "just below the surface" -- its compulsion. And given how precious that time is, it feels awful to be floundering! I am so grateful for your note. The site is not easy to photograph because when the sun is out, the camera really exaggerates the shadows; therefor I'm uploading shots taken on overcast days. The setting is a suburban woodland of ginormous red, white and chestnut oaks and tulip poplars that slowly are giving way to runs of American beech. It is hillside watershed into a Potomac river tributary. Soil is two or three decades of leaf litter sitting on top of marine clay, and that clay is important to keep stable. The backyard is on the south side of the house -- the sun travels right over my roof line, is blotted by 2:00 p.m. by a big old white oak on my west wall. It is a pie shaped lot, the narrow end deep in the woods. The first picture is from last fall, looking at the back of the house from about half-way to the back property line. That's metasequoia "Miss Grace" planted high on some big rocks (that can be repurposed eventually). On the far left, a very old, not terribly lovely Fosters holly (I think) -- the end of a screen of now 18 footers that I've been trying to rehab with pruning but... The second photo is from early this spring-- my little Lilliputian garden secreted among those great big trunks. [All the cryptomeria here took a bad hit with the freeze/thaw cycle this spring]. I was okay with the idea of a "grotto" as the best I would be able to do in the shadows. But when the big oak off my deck that so intimately connected the house to the woods finally gave up and came down, everything changed. In the photo below, the rocks along the property line on the right (which extends another 20 feet beyond the rocks) I put there with the idea of filling in the grade a bit, but want someone trained in water/erosion control to keep me from making a mistake I might regret. I imagined, and still do, a small pondless falls next to the big stump on the far right -- not for splash, just for some sense of movement. Now that I am thinking bolder, I also imagine that the "source" for that falls is a very shallow "destination" pond roughly behind the azaleas (in the photo below it would be mostly screened by the top of the variegated dogwood). The dogwood is Samaritan -- just one of many poor choices/placements I've made -- it will get too big to between the sun and everything that is behind it. The river stones I was just playing with. Those will go away. You can just make out the deck coffee table in the photo below, where I imagine a bench would be. The Nootka (oddly my favorite thing in the whole yard-- I love weeping forms and this one just makes me smile) also is poorly placed, probably should be snug up against the big stump to backdrop the vignette of a the falls, with a red dissectum in there somewhere (I have 1 gallon Shaina, Temukayama, Red Dragon, and Orangeola waiting for homes), and a bigger boulder than I have. I also went with Alice hydrangeas on the left for scale, but honestly I do not like them, at least not now -- they are coarse -- another variety would be lovelier. Or something else fronting that stand of oaks. The Atlas Cedar was another inexpensive chance taken -- I'm fond of him but tall as he is, he'll get no respect inn that spot. Apricot carpet roses in front of the hydrangea were meant to help call him out. Not shown here are a recently purchased an "at your own risk" 6 foot Seiryu that needs a home and an Omurayama that I imagine on the property line next to the "pondless" pond, this side the stump. And Red Sentinel, back there just to the left of the wood pile, is not his best self in that shade, neither red nor sentinel-like. Seems like his columnar shape should be next to a trunk. LOL, Where do I start from here? Lay in the hardscaping, re-position the existing trees...purchase many more... but this time with something like a plan. I sure could use a steady hand to guide me..

In 2003 builder brass was already on the way out. Nothing wrong with quality brass hardware, but it was all the cheap builder brass stuff, some of which was plastic coated with a shiny brass finish. I just built a house and the style is clean lines, but Spanish inspired. All my door hardware is Emtek Sandcast Medium Bronze. The kitchen cabinet hardware is Honey Bronze (champagne gold) from Top Knobs. Secondary bathrooms have chrome. Master and Powder have light Bronze from Rocky Mountain Hardware on cabinets and Brizo Luxe Gold (champagne) fixtures. My light fixtures range from champagne gold to antique brass to a brown-bronze. So all in the warmer colors, except for the chrome bathrooms, but that is a neutral and classic choice for bathrooms. You can do brushed nickel throughout the house and use chrome in the bathrooms. There is no right or wrong, but you do want to make sure they all complement each other.

Oh, thank you @Jemimabean ! We have been pinching ourselves at how it is coming together... quite literally a dream come true. One of our goals for the reno was to get more light into our dark kitchen and dark living room. Another goal was to connect more to the outdoors, visually and spatially. Here's a preview of the zellige BS tile just installed this week - color chosen partly to reflect/connect to the exterior greenery: On the rest of the reno: we are getting there. Floors were done last week; painting is done. Awaiting installation of our Andersen Big Door, screens for the porch; some light and bathroom fixtures; a punch list of small things. We have a furniture delivery coming on Wednesday and I'm hoping we can get moved back in by the 4th of July weekend so we can host... we'll see. And, because we are gluttons for punishment, we are getting a new puppy Thursday. We get to enter a new kind of chaos before we're even through the last round - LOL. :-)