Most Fired Earth paint colours are available in masonry paint, it's expensive (compared to standard masonry paint) but goes on a dream, with great coverage. Gives you a great choice of colours, we went with Stone Ocre, although on a more modern house, it looks much nicer than white or magnolia (IMHO).

Thanks Colour Happy. Plasterer has been in already but only plastered where needed so I'm assuming that means we don't need to plaster behind wall paper (some of which had to be removed for the rewiring) and Painter seems happy enough to do remainder of filling/smoothing walls but thanks for the tip, I'll definitely check again with them. Re sisal, no dogs but small kids at home so need to stick to softer/more standard carpet!

Ha, funnily enough I tried some colours out on your walls in photoshop yesterday, which doesn't mean a thing, since it always looks different on screen, and I too thought that Ammonite worked well. Still, do try it out. Painted the skirting All White. Threw in some pattern with cushions, a framed poster will reflect light and is more interesting than a mirror (which loads of people use) and I thought that you could perhaps place a different cabinet for the TV along the wall next to the fireplace.

The last time I needed to do the "swatches on a wall" thing it was in a room that had been painted a bright daffodil yellow. I had my doubts anything less than three coats would work, but nonetheless, this is what I did: first, we mapped out a section on the largest blank wall and painted it with a no-bleed primer, so as to have as neutral a background as possible. Then - as we had narrowed our selection down to three shades - we painted each shade in a column as long as we could fit in the space, with the white primer sectioned between each column. After a few days, we both agreed that one color worked better than the other two - and that's when we ordered the paint. It was the most successful change-a-color project we ever did. It's somewhat fiddly, and getting the three small sample cans plus the primer wasn't cheap (but not terribly expensive, either), but I feel we were well repaid by not painting the entire room only to find the color we ended up with didn't work. I've never been able to visualize color from the small samples or cards you get at the paint store, and I wouldn't be able to envision a whole wall, let alone a room, from a 12"x12" square. The larger samples we painted, though, did the trick for me. p.s. And painting over our test swatches was no problem. We knew we'd have to use two coats on the walls to get rid of the yellow so no tinge remained, and using two coats covered our sample columns as well as the primer beneath - you cannot tell we ever tried the samples before we painted. ;-)