Lighting, outlet, and fireplace decisions

Today we're out at the house working on the wiring and lighting diagram. The electrician is coming next week and needs to know where we want outlets, switches, and low-voltage wiring. The low-voltage wiring is for strip lights of LEDs and LEDs in track lighting. These are difficult decisions to make when we haven't yet chosen lighting fixtures. If code requires one outlet in the garage, do we want more? Do we want eight? We're currently thinking of having five.

We have a new (brilliant) plan for the fireplace wrap-around, or tile surround around the fireplace wall below the mantle and to the sides of the fireplace. We looked at a lot of different tiles, stones, cultured stones, wood, marble, granite, etc. for the fireplace surround. Working off a picture of our fireplace from the fireplace catalog, the tile store identified the tile used in the promotional fireplace magazine pictures and gave us a sample to take home. It's a mottled gray with brownish undertones. Between each row of these big tiles we were planning to have a row of almost-black tiles as an accent.

As MF was looking at something online yesterday, she discovered a scheme with staggered bands of contrasting materials coming in from the sides. MF's genius idea (Tom and the architect love it!) is to use the ash wood as our contrasting bands instead of tiles! And, we'll use ash as the mantle, which will all tie the fireplace back into the ash being used in the floors and some of the cabinets.