This cottage would look great with brickwork left unpainted. Somehow, painted bricks always weather badly and in short time, look shabby. Traditional paint colours for Federation houses were very limited, generally, maroon, brunswick or deep brunswick green and cream. Your cottage deserves a more modern and chic approach. The front facade, including above the garage would look very smart painted a dark storm grey (smoky blue grey). Garage door and window trim would be so good, using a purplish aubergine shade. Both these colours are complimentary to the colours in the bricks. For the fence, I would use same colour as the trim and garage doors or you could use the blue grey......very smart indeed.

@midesign0401, Hi Megan, yes it is heaven, I take a look at it all and sigh in happiness!!! As for the house, there's a bit of money to go ahead but this is now our busy time of the year, as we are hay contractors spending many many hours in tractors. However, I intend to get onto the next job ASAP which is laying the sill tiles around the veranda. It's a bit of an old fashioned look but these tiles will protect our limestone bricks from water stain when it's raining constantly in winter. The water will run off the sill tile and drop just a little shy of the bricks. Limestone is not only rough in our case but very porous and we also plan to have these tiles on all the window sills too, like the old tan brick houses from the 50's and the chocolate brown sill they had on their windows,only ours are cream not chocolate. It will be easy to wipe the sills from time to time and keep the house neat and clean. Once these tiles ar in place, 80mtrs of tiles, then we can concrete the veranda and then the roof iron can go on hopefully before Christmas. We have all the bricks for the home but need to find another $16,000 for all the rest of the windows. We are only using our own income, not borrowing at all so we have to do a budget and see if we can allow the money for the windows as the income we earn from Sept to Dec, is about 90% of our income for the entire year. It's taken 7 years now to get to this point having spent more that $80,000 already as I'm keeping a diary of spending. Goodness knows how much a 30+ square home with pool would cost if we had to pay a builder!!! We are owner builders and we've done everything ourselves including digging all the foundation and laying over 5000 standard bricks and digging the hole for the pool and fitting the pool including all the plumbing. We put in all the concrete stumps, layed the floor and fitted all the underfloor plumbing with a plumber friend guiding us along. We also put up all the framing and roof trusses, so we are absolutely chuffed with our abilities and progress.

Gyprocking is done. Picked the bathroom tiles and laundry tiles. They will go in this week. Need to pick the external tiles outside the main door. I am not sure if I should go with the same as the driveway exposed agg ( which I haven't picked yet).or to pick different tiles. According to the architects design, it's tiles. One side of the garage wall comes along this walk way and the garage will be painted Dulux-monument colour. So I'm not sure, if I should match the monument colour- tiles? Or go lighter colour tile matching my internal floors? Or go with exposed agg in this walkway as well? Too many decisions :p :D

what a fabulous looking house but i wonder how it would look if you rendered only the dark lower bricks and sills to match the render and keep the dark horizontal stripe above the windows.. a graphic artist should be able to make some images to help you see how it would look