House Updates - Inspiration Pictures

What would we ever do without Houzz and Pinterest?  Both websites have been such a source of inspiration to us as we've built our home.  

Here is what we are thinking for a few decisions we have coming up...

Our mantle will look like this but won't be as wide.  I think we are doing carrara marble around the fireplace where the black is in the below picture.

Our fireplace will be shaped like this with hopefully a slab of bluestone on top of the hearth.  We will be using the same brick from our house but likely will not smear the mortar over it.  We decided to stay with the below picture and not do a mantle.    

We are thinking about doing large pieces of bluestone as a patio off the covered porch like the below.  Don't look at the fireplace or any of that, just the large pieces of stone with grass in between.  Isn't this so cool looking? 

Working on figuring out what we want for landscaping in our yard.  I do know that we want LOW maintenance.  Our yard now is 0.8 acres of major landscaping with lots of trimming required.  We hope to make this yard pretty but practical.  We want to spend the money on large trees in the backyard for privacy.  We'll see...we need to work on this as I haven't put much thought into this yet.  

Grilling station.  We are trying to use our current grill and build it in but have it be so we can insert a grill like the below in when our grill dies.  This is our inspiration picture.  We'll be using our brick, not the stone like below.  We'll see if can we make something like this work. 

Any thoughts are always appreciated!