As no one discussed whether the size of the table was correct, I thought I would throw in a few tips... 1. The table should be placed a minimum of a metre away from the walls (or buffet) so that when someone is sitting down, a person can easily get behind this person to sit down at the next chair. 2. Allow 0.5m within the alignment of a passageway, so that people aren't encroaching onto the passageway when seated. Also so the furniture is not jutting out visually into the hallway. 3. You need to allow for comfortable passage beside the island bench through to the back door. From the plan shown, all this will work. To know whether the table will fit and where it should be placed. It is best to mark out the position of the table on the floor and then put chairs up to this so you can imagine where the chairs will be in relation to the space (both when in use and pushed in). Better still, so you can fully visualise the volume the table takes up, get a smaller table and cut up a cardboard to the right size and put it on top. All the best, Mark

Kelly, looking at your plans, I personally think it would actually make more sense if you were to split the island with the higher stone benchtop up to the kitchen boundary, then a lower table height benchtop (stone or timber, up to you) for the seating area past that point. I think visually it will look much better, particularly given the two doors on either side, will have a less obtrusive sight line, plus it won't look like you ran out of space to fit an island in the kitchen

For what it's worth we have a cottage with one hundred years old timber floors – mainly not tongue and groove just beautiful boards that we pulled up, re-trimmed and relaid. The boards are just beautiful – and they are probably mainly spotted gum as we live amongst them and when the cottage was built they would have used the timber from the local mill. We chose a satin finish for them and they just glow – everyone who walks in exclaims about how lovely they are. When we built a modern extension a couple of years ago we were lucky enough to find some more old (maybe 60-70 years) floor boards that came out of an old shed that was being demolished – they looked beyond retrieval but they were lovely big, heavy boards so they had plenty of meat on them so once they had been re-trimmed and thicknessed they have been finished with the same satin finish and also look amazing. I love that they look like timber (once part of a tree, a living, growing, imperfect but wonderful organism) rather than looking timber-like.

Okay, firstly, this is very difficult to do without seeing the room in person. So rather than suggesting a colour, let me tell you some theory and hopefully you can work it out. The painting looks a little yellow on my screen, I think it would look different in person. You want the image to stand out. What you're looking for is contrast between the image and your surroundings. Contrast can give seperation between elements and that's what you're after, the wall to receed behind the painting. white is not cutting it because it's competing with the image. The image has some light bright tones ie it's bright and the white wall will be bright, so a while wall and the painting will both compete for your attention. the other problem you have is all of the other elements in the room are darker and warm timber, we notice warm colours before cooler colours (ie blues) first, so it's likely all of thu sis competing against each other. So to not compete with everything else, you want something cooler but also not saturated (without a lot of colour). You want people to forget about the wall. again it's very difficult without seeing the room, so any colour I give you is not going to work. Get a few swatches from Bunnings and take them home and hold them next to the picture in the room. Narrow it down the 3 paints then get a small canvas, Bunnings is cheap, paint that with your colours and rest them on the wall with the painting. Move the canvas around the wall. Good luck. Colour is difficult but just try and get something that doesn't compete with the painting.