Hi Rooster Thanks very much for your comment and this style of furniture is not in everybody's taste but I appreciate your feedback Dean

In my house, (which is slightly older) we have vents that blend with our ceiling colour.

Well, for us our first 'house' was an old 50's commission house, very sturdy solid brick but small, old, ugly and bad layout (oh that layout was completely wrong)... it was bought solely based on location (young families in the area, good schools, easy access to public transport, shops, capital growth, etc)... we considered renovating and/or extending more than once, considered moving a couple of times, had two past failed attempts at building, and all of the above for various reasons redundancy, GFC, you name it... so we waited, tried, failed, waited, tried again, sweated long summers w/o A/C, one long winter with a broken heater, not to mention the broken dishwasher (arh those dishes) and drove each other mad in that house... nevertheless it had provided us with a roof over our heads and in which we had more happy memories for 14 long, very long years... but now, now that we finally can, we have kept the memories and have gladly said goodbye to this old house earlier in the year, to make way for our new second house which will definitely be our 'forever home' and we cannot wait... my mama always said 'good things come to those who wait' I guess she was right :)

I love our glass splash back. We choose an electric blue as the rest of our kitchen has a lot of timber, white and windows. Easy to keep clean, withstands the heat of the stove and you can choose any colour you like. you can even match it with an existing wall colour if you wanted to. The aluminium one sounds good, but I think that in our climate with salty air and a lot of moisture it would show corrosion spots very quickly. macymacmaples, I agree that there are a lot of choices for tile, but the 'easy to replace' comment doesn't really make sense to me. Then again, I have no idea how easy it would be to replace our splash back, which is wedged between the overhead cupboards and the benchtop - I still love it though, even after 10 years!!!