It is the ceiling and garden that are letting this picture down. The ceiling needs to be a colour that works with the colour of the bricks - currently it doesn't. The suggestion of the house numbers on the column is good - keep them big or you are wasting your time. But the garden is all wrong. The retaining wall is past its use-by-date and looks as tho it could be removed without the need to replace it. A garden of green would work without the need for any other colour as green against the colours in your home would work beautifully.

STAGE 2 COMPLETED! We decided to go with the same dark grey as the front door and glad we did. We love it. Thanks for all your help and advice, it really was good to other people’s ideas as they were things we never thought of ourselves.

I did get a guy out to give me a quote on cleaning and painting the roof. He said he will have to quote it using scaffolding because of the steep roof. That was a couple of weeks ago, but haven't heard back from him yet. I have seen some bad paint jobs of terracotta tiles so am a bit nervous about getting it painted. I wouldn't mind if my tiles were just slightly darker like yours rather than orange, but I do know that the darker they are, the more they will hold heat and Brisbane is hot.

$3000 for new doors sound like a bargain but if that doesn't include installation i would strongly recommend that you invest in professional installation (at a fixed price) as replacing old hinges can be very challenging for the inexperienced and we've patched a 40 year old kitchen with very thin sheets of melamine placed over damaged shelves, renewed sagging doors by filling up old screw holes and tightened hinges, replaced damaged edges using a roll of iron on edge stripping tape but, the minor damage on your edges and the backless cabinets could easily be disguised with some paint but i have say that our now patched kitchen was designed and built for an architect, various other kitchen we've built or renovated and my newest kitchen also custom made at very high cost have all been made out of a variation of a laminated board ..luckily you love the "very expensive to replace" counters but i would also consider investing in new kickboards to get rid of the quad edges around the floor and a better location for your microwave..and look forward to seeing your results