Been working on this for maybe a week. Looking for some C&C.
J
Looks pretty good so far. Put some more texture on the window, and increase the resolution / vividness of the sky texture. Don’t forget the doorknob either, and I think you need to fresh up the whole scene with some bumpmapping. You might want to render with Yafray (if you’re not doing that already) and make the lamp glass a bit more transparent. Other than that, looks pretty good.
I agree with Python Angel, but I may suggest that you just improve the quality of the textures, materials and lighting overall.
Lighting. This definitely needs work on the lighting. If you did that, you would pretty much have an absolutely realistic scene! Great work! Keep it up.
I would suggest using Yafray, and right now it looks like you’re using only one light. You need lights from several places.
-Chris
The painting seems to be hung rather low on the wall. Generally, single paintings are hung so the center is at eye level of someone standing in the room. The single crosspiece in the door is too low: if a door knob were installed, it would be centered on that crosspiece, and adults would have to stoop to use it. The table appears too high, but that may just be an effect of perspective or the painting nearby being hung too low. I haven’t seen any windows with two rectangular panes. Generally there are four panes, and each pane is much closer to a square in shape. I suppose windows can be manufactured any way you like, but this seems to be an older house, and older house builders were pretty conservative. I am in a second floor room, and when I stand, the view out the window is less than half full of sky. Unless this room is on the 147th floor, the view out the window should include landscape. Finally, the glow from the oil lamp should be much more red-orange. Even if it were an incandescent bulb (which its not, since there’s no cord) it would still not be pure white.
The good stuff: the modeling on all the molding, the picture frame, the lamp, the window, the door, especially the table, is great! The table and lamp combination is really outstanding.
The textures look good, except for the floor. A decent hardwood floor wouldn’t have those gaps between the boards.
Thanks for all the comments guys. Now that the holidays are over I guess everyone is getting back to work.
Python Angel and Orinoco, I have tried Yafray - severel times. When I try the internal I get a black scene, When I tried the external it crashed. I looked for a tutorial but I had a hard time finding a basic this is how you start for Blender 2.42.
I do have textures in the wood work and furniture but in this period they were sanded really smooth. So I have to keep the texture more subdued. With the texture increase little cruds are showing up in the woodwork (artifacts?). Any suggestions on how to get rid of, or at least minimize them?
The make-a-sky thingy in Blender is just a little too unpredictable to be able to do a sky view out the window, so I went to Morguefile.com and got a sunset shot. After some slight adjustments in Photoshop I put the pic on a plane and cranked up the EMIT a little. With the colored plane outside the window you can see faint shadows on the glass. And here I was thinking all the window tweaking I was doing was having no effect.
Popsy and Magician dude, the lighting is really the most important thing in the scene and I have never really stopped tweaking in. Right now there are 5 lights (in the first one there were four), 1) in the lamp with a small disc under it to throw lamplight on the table and create the ring of shadow cast by the bottom of the lamp. 2) one slightly above the lamp (sitting on the glass chimney) creating the shadow cast by the table. 3) on up near the ceiling to create the hotspot above the lamp. 4) one over the rug just below table height to “open up” the shadow under the table and on the rug. 5) one near the camera. This one is actually the main scene light but it also creates the hotspot on the lamp which helps give the illusion that all the light comes from inside the lamp.
All in all I am trying not to light the scene too brightly which would ruin the vintage feel.
Oh, Orinoco, I will probably get to the floor last. Color wise it seems to be fine. I agree with what you said about the spaces between the slats. That looks like a more contemporary way of doing it.
thanks again
J
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The only things I would suggest right now are perhaps adusting the RayMir of the table, (giving it a nice, polished look!), and finding a different texture for the floor…the current texture looks a little too “drawn” to me…a different one would really help this room to look photorealistic. 
(And I agree…Yafray all the way!)
I actually had a question for you…I haven’t been using Blender that long, and I was wondering how you made the table legs with the curving action? Looks very elegant!
IMHO It would look better with a bunch of outward buffer shadow lamps. The ray shadow doesnt look too good…
Nice model, the table looks good.
Still having trouble getting Yafray to work. Anybody know of a good beginner tutorial for blender 2.42?
free_ality, What do you mean?
IMHO It would look better with a bunch of outward buffer shadow lamps
I don’t think I know what “outward buffer shadow lamps” thingies is, are, whatever? :o
GrloftheCity, I’ve been working on the floor. The trick is to get it lightly textured but looking smooth. That solution is evading me right now so I’ve been saving it for last.
The table leg took me a while to figure out. What you will need to do is put a sketch in as a background image. Start near the center of the leg and connect a series of cubies together one at a time. Line up the verts and hit Remove Doubles as you work.
As the leg nears the end you will have to work with shapes that are easiest for you to manipulate. (In the curvy part I used some triangles.) Don’t overlap the verts until you you have roughed out the curve. When you get to the end be sure to keep the verts from different shapes separate in case you need to adjust the curve later (and you probably will).
To make the curve stick out just select the verts for the middle parts (now you know why you should keep them separate) and scale them out a little. If you are not that good at scaling you can select the verts only on one side and move them out with the direction arrows.
Copy the half of the leg you just finished, flip it around, line up the verts and Remove Doubles. Then slighty enlarge the scroll at the bottom end.
When everything is adjusted turn on subsurf and turn the leg 90 degrees and give it a Control-R and move that little yellow line, one to each side of the leg (I’m having a little bit of trouble remembering the name of that manuver right now, I’m kinda new at this too). You will want to keep a little bit of a rounded edge to the leg so it looks like scroll work when you get to the curve at the end, in other words you want to see a bit of a carved out border between the the parts that come together.
Hope this helps. It took me a little while to remember everything but I think I got it all. Try it and let me know.
Thanks for the suggestions all. It’s getting late so I probably won’t get them posted till tomorrow. 
J
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As in, use a few outward facing spot lamps, instead of normal lamps. The hard ray-traced shadows dont look great…
And maybe try some AO, if you cant get yaf-ray to work…
yo u need better lighting mayn…
Thanks for the added visuals! I think I could get that to work…I am busy with other projects right now, but will definitely be trying this out when I get the time! 
Well, it looks like it’s dusk out doors so some ambient sky color spilling onto the window sill might help. Also there’s a bit too much specular reflection on the table’s edge, although it looks very nice on the trim for the doorway.
I think you have to correct some proportions problems…
It seems that the window is too narrow.
When I compare the objects inside de room it seems that the room is too short…I don’t know, it can be only a matter of perspective…
Keep the good work!!!
Finally, had a little bug in the computer and spent most of yesterday trying to squash the little booger. It really felt good to get back to work. 
Worked on the setting sun coming in through the window, a bit of reflectivity in the table and the floor. Played with more texture in the floor but it didn’t look right. I got the reflection to show mostly around the edges of the floor (at first I could see the whole room in the floor, bleech.) I think it looks much better now because the floor to shows much more variation in color, tone and texture in the different lighting situations across the room.
Softened the edge of the shadow the table is casting. Free_ality, I couldn’t get the thing with the spots to work but you gave me an idea that seems to look okay. In place of the one lamp creating the shadow cast by the table there are three stacked on top of each other. All I had to do is place them close enough that you can’t see them as separate shadows. Then, since I have three where one was before I set each to 1/3 of the intensity of the original lamp.
Took a look at the window style and size but left it as is. I spent the last few days looking at older buildings, especially houses, and saw that there are many different window sizes and styles. At the time they were built there was no Home Depot or other chain stores where you could buy pre-made, pre-hung window units so most were built onsite. Sometimes size and style had as much to do with how much money and materials were available to complete the project as much as the design drawings did.
When I first posted this scene I thought I was a lot closer to a finished product than I really was. So, are we finished?
Thanks for the help everyone.
J
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That is very nice. Especially the table. The light coming in from the window is overpowering the table’s shadow. Maybe turn it down to about 30% or so of it’s current setting. Maybe polish up your brass a bit so that it looks like metal. Other than that the scene looks awesome. I’m amazed at how much realism you’ve been able to tweek into it.
Try a bumpmap on the carpet to make it look more fuzzy (maybe a stucci bump not really shure).
Table looks great.
Weird light at the bottom the rest of the light is good.
Cheerio
To my way of thinking, the most-objectionable parts of this scene so-far are the lighting sources. In the real world, no desk-lamp would be that bright, nor would its shadow-effect beneath the table possibly be that abrupt. You absolutely must have more light-sources in this scene. I think that this will greatly improve it.
The only other point of objection that really stands-out to my eye is the point in the rear where the two wall-planes converge: there ought to be a vertical joint there. But once again, the change of lighting will probably eliminate these problems.
As an aside, here you are seeing the marvelous quandary that is fairly-routinely faced by professional photographers: the lighting in any photograph is probably an illusion. That is to say, the light-sources and shadow-sources that we “want to sell to the viewer as being ‘real’” most probably cannot be “real” in terms of actually exposing the film. You need to be sure that the image is properly exposed (lit…) whether or not the apparent light-sources that are in-frame would actually be sufficient to do the job; they probably won’t (and in this case, they clearly aren’t).
So-o-o… you “cheat.” In other words, first you right up actual lighting-sources that will cause the film to be evenly, but unobtrusively, illuminated. Then, you “salt” the picture with the apparent light-source and highlights that are consistent with the nature and the placement of that light-source. The highlights don’t have to do the job … they don’t … but they simply have to be consistent with “the user’s imagination of” how that scene would look if it were, somehow, lit by the apparent sources.
Such peculiarities are the reason why a double-page spread of “a hotel in daylight” in Arizona Highways magazine was actually shot in the dead of night using 100% artificial light-sources, up to and including the “sunlight in the window.”