This time with pictures...

Okay, so first of all, forgive the terrible paintshop rendering of our future layout and the picture quality--these were taken with our old digital, and you can REALLY tell the difference! Now that that's settled, here's what we're thinking for the living room.

Here's what we've got going now. This is the wall with the three bookshelves and the garage door in the above picture. This wall is what you see immediately on walking in. Currently, the layout is nice and open, but almost TOO open. There's no itimacy, and really no seating. We'll be moving the couch to the wall with the window. If we move the bookshelves to this wall, we'd raise the left-most floating shelf, and then put a flat screen TV on top. We could also leave the bookshelves and find something else to put the flat screen TV on.

This wall has already changed since we took the picture. We've moved the bookshelves to make them more centered, eliminated the top picture, raised the bottom picture and added a large silver mirror on each side of the picture.

If we went with the above plan, this wall would basically be empty. Justin would DIE if I let him put the buffet that matches the hutch-I-hate here. But I don't know that I can stand it. I would be way too many wooden things in the living room.
In this picture you can see the stupid half wall that is unfortuantely home to a TON of electric work or I would have sledgehammered it already. In terms of this picture, the window is immediately to the left. So our couch would be in front of the window, and the loveseat would butt up against the half wall. It drives me nuts that it would extend past the wall, but what can you do?
I'm still a little worried about going really dark for the wood flooring because our furniture is already so dark. But I think my mom is right--if we had a lighter area rug under the couches, it would probably be all good!