Home Renovations: Living Room

We've been in our house for 2 years now, and we're just now starting to make it our own.  We took care of the immediate problems such as my office, and the up and downstairs additions, but drug our feet when it came to the main parts of the house. 

I will admit in part it is my hesitance picking colors.  I always pick the wrong color.  Seriously.  Recently though I've taken a new approach.  The internet.  Novel, I know.  Instead of just seeing a picture I like and trying to match the paint swatch to it, I realized it was going to take more research to find the perfect colors.

When we determined that we would renovate our living room, I knew the exact color and style I wanted, based off this picture from Pottery Barn:

I ripped this picture out of a Pottery Barn catalog 2-3 years ago and have kept it in my desk ever since.  I LOVE the look of this wall and decor.  Obviously I'm not alone, I see this repinned on Pinterest daily.

So, my internet research yielded me the name of the paint, Benjamin Moore, Newbury Port Blue.  Then. much to my chagrin, I started looking at Google Images under that name.  And the paint is dark. Like navy blue.

We tried it anyways, and picked out 2 more similar shades, lighter of course, and bought the $2+ samples.  BEST thing we ever did. 

The one in the middle is the Pottery Barn color, the one on the right is a Lowes Valspar, Magnet Dapple, the one we chose. 

This room was no easy task.  Here are some before pics:

We were very fortunate to have purchased a home with hardwood floors, but that natural woodwork HAD TO GO.  I'm a big fan of white woodwork, I think that it's timeless.  I grew up in a home built about 1915, and my mom now lives in a Victorian home from the early 1900's, both of which had white woodwork.

We made the room work for us without painting for the last 2 years:

Enough already, I know.  Here's our (almost) finished living room:

And my favorite part, inspired by pinterest of course...

Um yeah, how awesome is this??

Much like the above Pottery Barn photo, I want to decorate the wall about our shelving unit, I just have to map it out first.  I have a bunch of framed photos, decorations, and two gold letter A's, I just want to make sure it's perfect first.  Once I do that, it'll be done!

Well almost...hubs needs to put his new table saw to good use and put in some crown molding for me!

I seriously love this room.  I love drinking my coffee in there in the morning and watching my DVR'ed shows.  I finally feel like it's our own space! And the only expense was the paint and new curtains, I pulled all the decorations from the rest of the house.

So, what do you think, good interpretation of the Pottery Barn pic?