First projects in the new home - The Living Room

I've been so excited for weeks and weeks to put our first touches on our new house.  Since we decided on colors and ordered the fabric for the curtains, it was time to tackle the paint color.  When I did my design board, I thought I knew that I wanted a pale blue on the walls, it's a lot different when you actually see it ON the walls though.
We went with Home Depot for our Behr Paint.  They sell the little sample for like 2 bucks, so we got four colors to try.

The color Eric's working on there is the one I thought I wanted - the pale blue.  Only it looked more like white.  So we tried the next darker one we picked and Eric painted over the light color, but it still looked white, and I didn't want the dark colors, so we went back to Home Depot and got the next color - to the right of the big white strip.

I really thought that would be it, but the more we contemplated it, the more we decided it was still too light, and ended up going with the darkest of the five - go figure.  

We were waiting for my parents to come to paint, so while waiting, I redesigned my shelves.  I had been reading other blogs and watching DIY shows and kept seeing people decorating shelves with books without their jackets.  I have a TON of books with jackets, and never bothered to check to see the colors, when I did, I ended up taking ALL the jackets off of my books!  I had quite a few blues, reds, and grays, and they look so good on a shelf!  Here are a few of my favorites from the living room:

I also bought this cute blue mirror on sale at Target for like $5!  I also bought the three frames in the background for cheap.  You'll see how I used them.  Brinkley wanted to show how he matches with the theme as well. :)

Before painting the entire room, I really wanted to paint the fireplace white.  I always hated how it blended into the wall - I don't know what those builders were thinking.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

Ahhh, So much better!   Now it was time to PAINT!!  Mom and Dad came in for the fourth of July weekend and helped us out.  We got the whole room done in about two hours.  The boys painted, and mom and I sewed the curtains.  We also spray painted my vintage dresser mirror and the three white frames red.  It was a lot of fun, and here is the finished product:

I love this mirror!

I used fabric from the curtains and pillows in the frames.

Next up for this room:  

1. Hang the TV on the wall.  It bothers me how there's so much empty space above it.

2. Build a cubby storage bench to add extra seating below the three red frames.