Project Family Room

This was our walk through on our house in April 2010 (that is our nice realtor in the picture).  This is the way the family before us had the family room decorated--LOTS of furniture, dark peach tile on the floor and fireplace, a built in holding the TV and taking up precious space in the room.  It needed some work and reconfiguring.  I am by no means streamlined or contemporary, but I can't stand clutter.  Thankfully, they had a beautiful cutout niche above the fireplace and some nice white shutters on the windows.

We tore out the peach tile (which was in the whole house practically) and put in chocolate, distressed wood floors.  We put travertine on the fireplace and tore out the built in.  Here is the family room in process right before we moved into the house.  The tile has been torn up, the built in taken out and the paint colors for the niche are being chosen--thus the weird colors on the wall.

Here is our family room currently.  I apologize for the dark picture.  I have the wonderful habit of taking pictures at the worst time of day.  That is setting sunlight on our fireplace, not some weird design.:

(Here is the blank canvas wall I mention below)

I'm working on my family room this year.  After unemployment for our family in 2011, we are thankful for the gift of an income in 2012 and ready to jump back into house projects.  We recently had both crown moulding and pocket lights put into our family room ceiling.  We were tired of squinting at our guests whenever we sat in there at night--or we'd turn on our really bright patio lights just outside to add to the illumination of the room (sad!).

I'm loving the lights!  We had four added to the room, one focal spotlight for our fireplace and one in the "hallway" between the family room and the kitchen. 

The family room is tiny.  We don't have a teeny, tiny house, but the smallest rooms by far are both the family and living room.  Entertaining can be an issue since we often entertain 50-60 people when we have ministry leadership meetings/dinners at our home.  We knew about the issue when we moved into this house, but the positives in the house/yard outweighed this negative.  Thankfully, the yard is nice and big, but even southern California has limits on how often you can ask guests to sit outside. 

Because of this, we used leather ottomans as a coffee table, which also can be separated and moved as seats.  Our small couch holds about 3 guests, and right now we have a massive leather chair by the TV wall.
We want to move that chair elsewhere and get two proportionally smaller armchairs on each side of the TV console.  We also have three barstools right where I am standing to take the pictures, as we have a breakfast bar counter facing out into our family room.  These are handy to turn around and act as additional seating.

In addition, I would like to put white federalist moulding wrapping around the bottom half of the room to brighten up this part of the house.  It gets very little direct sunlight, and I am a girl who likes light and bright. 

I also want to do a photo wall around the TV.  I can't decide if I should have white frames or black.  I love white, but I am thinking that since they will surround the TV and almost camaflouge the flatscreen into the picture wall, they should have black frames with large, white matting.  The TV will have too much "weight" with white frames around it.  I will do all black and white photos.

 I also want to paint the 80's brass on the fireplace glass with a black metal paint and, eventually, I want to get a larger, crown moulding looking mantle to cover our lovely, thin plywood one. 

Finally, I want some long, ceiling to floor white column curtains to frame the slider that leads out to the backyard.  It is immediately to the right of the couch.

What are your thoughts, my decorating friends?  Do you have any ideas for the wall around the TV?  What kind of armchairs would you buy for each side of the TV console and what color would you prefer to see?  Right now I have creams, tans, rusts and golds in the room, but I'm open to another color.  All those colors blend nicely with our dark, red undertoned kitchen cabinets and wood floor. 

I'm excited for project family room and can't wait to show you the progress!