The parlour palm is the most reliable palm for indoors .. Plants add exponentially to the indoors effect and personality, as has been said many times over, however as with anything, ideally should be placed/chosen tastefully and not in a hodge-podge or messy looking fashion. Unhealthy looking plants are particularly unattractive ..

Hi Complete Kitchens....Yes, I realise that 20k could get a good standard kitchen (our own one recently done was about 26k including scullery), I'm more talking about the ones that talk about doing kitchen, bathroom, painting and even moving some walls on 20k. What my point was, is its great when people like you actually give an idea of a cost of a project - it's easy to get fired up with inspiration and then get thoroughly dissapointed when reality hits! Things are expensive these days and I think for some who may not have done any renovations to their house for years, they don't really have a lot of idea of the costs involved.

I like the look of the outside of the house , and initially I wouldn't change the yellowy beige colour . What I would do is get the concrete block retaining wall either rendered in the same colour as the house , or if the budget ran to it -- get a genuine stone facade . As far as gardens to soften the look , I'd stick to the meditarreanian theme , and do a couple of 2 metre tall green leafy plants in wooden round planters ( half wine barrels or similar ) , and maybe a long , slim garden ( 4 or 5 metres long by 40cm wide ) with marigolds or similar .

ok now I had a little play, I'm no good at computer drawing, I just don't have the patience, so its nothing special, But I think the main thing to keep is that angled arrangement to give it that similar feel. It's just a basic idea to shrink it down and I didn't even bother with measurements, you would have to have a proper sit and think about all that. I just thought there was a simple way to keep the shape but on a more reasonable scale. I think if you straighten it all out to a rectangle it's just not what was cool about the original. I think like the house sitter house, if you have main barn shaped buildings connected together with lower pitched porches, verandah and in between zones you could shrink the house right down. I think take... the overall shape, the classic pitched roof, and the colours, materials and finishes and you could have something less enormous but really nice.