jejvtr: I like the first link you showed, but the second one did not work. You are right the columns look similar. Perhaps you should leave them afterall, they are growing on me. It has a certain delicacy with the arched roof and you may change you mind also once the trim is painted different than the house color. Which is probably another reason my vote is for a non-white base color--to accentuate your lovely trimwork. I'm glad you are looking at other homes similar to yours for inspiration. When we were remodeling last year, I always kept a digital camera in my car and I would snap pics of features/colors/etc of houses I liked--usually while picking up or dropping off my kids from school or sports practices. I would try to drive a bit in the residential areas. Then when we were finalizing paint, I had my paint swatches with me and I would go up to houses which I liked and compare paint swatches. Once you and your DH find an inspiration pic I think this is helpful to narrow down to an actual color. You will always see things we don't, like lighting and how it works from various angles. What does DH think? Still white/red?

I am planning on painting an old china cabinet and want to do something to the inside back like discussed here. I am making the china cab a glossy black. I am thinking of silver fabric on some sort of panels that I can push into place. I absolutely love the deep color on the back of the white built ins that were in the blogger's photos so now I have to find something else to work on to get a similar effect. I love how it makes the white whiter and the light objects positively pop.

Monkeymo- My floors are actually screwed down at the ends and the recessed screwheads covered with a wood plug-so it does have a pegged appearance. The plugs were stained the same color as the planks-some show up more than others. I don't think the "feel" of my floor is any more rustic than those silly faux antique scraped floors that have been trendy lately. The kitchen had been the only wood floor in the house when I bought it, but I've been installing similar wood floors using the same screw covered with plug method. The effect is no more rustic than if the 5 in planks were nailed. My floor is not grooved-but there is enough space between planks that stuff could accumulate. Hasn't been a problem. I would think that having open grooves would be easier to clean if something was dropped. Reading your first post again, I picked up the cracked tile comment. Probably means your current subfloor has insufficient support for a tile floor-not rigid enough. Natural stone require a floor that's much stiffer than ceramic tile. You'll need to do a lot of reinforcement of the subfloor if you want a tile floor that doesn't crack. Travertines I've seen have been either too grayish or brassy gold to work with our colors-two exceptions being scabos and autumn blend-which I don't see for sale anymore. I only have one other pic of the kitchen-I've been busy gardening and haven't finished up the backsplash, etc. It's roughly a 20' x 30' room with half for the kitchen cabinets and a half bath and the other half has the kitchen table and the fireplaced family area. There's a sliding door to a large deck out of view to the right. Fridge, sink, DW, wall oven and a closet/pantry on unseen wall to right. P.S. The color combination of floor and cabinets looked fine before all those rugs went down. But my dogs do use the kitchen as part of their racetrack so... It might even look a little bland it the colors were too matchy.

I'm afraid I must disagree with the suggestion that green on the walls will tone down the brick. Actually, the opposite is true...colors that are opposites on the color wheel will bring up the color in both...so green makes orange look twice as orange, and yellow makes purple much stronger. We dealt with the same issue by painting our walls a soft neutral, and then putting a four to one mixture of water and paint in a bucket, washing it onto the brick chimney wall with a big paintbrush, and patting it down with a handful of cotton rag. This method works wonderfully to control the look, and keeps the variety among the different bricks, while tying it all into the room in a much more sophisticated way. It took one morning to do the whole thing, and gave the effect more of stone than brick. I wanted the hearth to relate to the dark floor rather than to the wall, because it keeps the brick wall from intruding visually into the room area...so I painted the inside of the firebox and the whole brick hearth flat black. Then I brushed a second coat of semi-gloss black just over the surfaces of the hearth bricks themselves, which made the whole thing settle into the floor. The grout stayed flat and shadowy, the nooks and crannies likewise, and the effect was much more natural than the dustiness of just flat black, or the fakey plasticky-ness of all semigloss. You could do the same thing with a deep tone of your carpet color. I wish I had a photo to show you. It looked wonderful, if I do say so myself!