sleepless, Thanks for the exchange. Quote; "Just how dirty is the 5 gallons of stone you remove each year and how do you remove it? I assume you put it back under the water falls" I put on my pond shoes and get in with a bucket and a plastic one quart mug. Then scoop up the gravel and transfer it to the bucket. I redistribute the gravel to the other two levels of the pond. The lowest spot is not very dirty. No muck, just small bits of hard black stuff (leaf stems and parts left over from winter maybe?). They are light enough that they suspend when stirred up and get pulled into the skimmer. "Does it develop the typical packing that settling filters develop? What is the slope of the liner? Is there a bottom drain?" No packing. No slope to speak of. It has three stepped depths, 6" then 18" then 24". Under the falls is about 18". There is no bottom drain. The gravel migrates from water turbulence under the falls and my fish always poking around in the gravel and pushing it from the upper to lower levels. "How often do you clean the filter? What type of filter?" I guess its the typical Aquascape setup. A skimmer with basket, filter pad and submersible pump. A 2" line goes to an off the shelf Bio falls with 2 filter pads and bio balls. I empty the skimmer basket as needed to keep the water flowing through it and wash the filter pad only once or twice per season. I don't clean the filter pads in the falls until I shut down my pump for winter. This may be shocking to some people but I let the good bacteria do the work. I also never drain the pond and clean it. Most of my maintenance time is spent tending to the plants (cutting out the ugly stuff ) netting out every leaf that I can find till shutdown in the fall and rearranging rocks. Mike K

As the others have said, that is the proper way to install mosaics that are face-mounted on paper. We DIY'd our kitchen backsplash with tiles like this, including the reverse bevel that yours has. It does make grouting more challenging, because you're having to try to fill in spaces that you can't see very well. Most tiling instructions have you pulling off the paper not long after the tile has mostly set up, so you can still tweak things if need be. But if he has done a good job, it shouldn't be a problem that the paper is still on there. Warm water and a sponge, get the paper wet, then start peeling from one corner and try to keep it all in one piece.

Renee you must be overwhelmed with all of these comments. Your countertops are GORGEOUS, so I do hope you keep them. Sophie's suggestion to stain the floors is well worth looking into. For what it is worth my suggestion for your backsplash is to go with a simple solid tile in a lighter color that coordinates with the countertop. I would suggest you not go too small with the tile- 3x6 to 4x12 would be a good size to stick with. You want to avoid too much movement in the backsplash as the counter (and the floor) have quite a bit of movement and you do not want them competing. Let the countertop be the star of the show. Good luck and let us know how it all ends up for you.

Undertones are tricky and the lighter, more reflective the color the trickier undertones become. What is "No undertone" in one home on one surface may be pink or green or blue in another. We have multiple things at play. The color itself has certain physical properties. Luminance, Chroma and Hue. The surface it is painted on may be smooth or rough and that will change how the light reflects off the surface. The paint has different gloss levels which changes how much light is reflected off the paint. Then you add in the quality and color of the light that is either coming through the windows or produced by artificial lighting in your home. The last part of the equation is the colors that surround the color you are looking at. Our brains receive about 11 million bits of information per second, but we only process about 50 bits of information per second. Our brain groups data so that it is easier to ingest. (Cool fact - when we hear a sentence our brain fires electromagnetic energy from different areas for nouns vs adjectives vs verbs etc. Even if you don't know the parts of speech your brain organizes types of words in different spaces.) When we see white we automatically compare it to every other color in the space and the brain decides how to process the information as a whole, not each individual color. We can make some assumptions based on comparison of whites to pure neutral white and say this will most likely have a blue undertone because it is bluer or grayer than pure neutral white, but if you place the white next to a brilliant pastel blue it may look more green or more purple than the blue. We also associate gray with blue. Remember how we see less color when we are depressed? What do we say? "I feel blue today". We're not seeing more blue, we are seeing more gray, but our brain groups gray and blue together. The best way I have found to test if my colors will work together or fight with each other is to look at the combinations outside around 2:00 in the afternoon on a sunny day. If they look good together they will still look good together when the color/quality of the light changes. They may not look the same, but the colors will all be impacted the same way by the light and will still work or not work together. Natural daylight reveals subtle color differences that you may miss with artificial or filtered light.