Hybrid cure, livingroom

In Apartment therapy, the eight step home cure book by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, the week four is all about the livinroom. Here is the contents of the livinroom cure. I liked how scb did this and I'm going to copy her, so my comments are also in Italic

Bones:

Clean up living room and any related closets. Will do
Repairs are being taken care of this week. Repairs are taken care on an ongoing basis, I will do repairs when I have the time

Breath:
Declutter all books and media. This is certainly something I need to do, especially the CD's need this desperately
Cancel 75% of all catalogues you receive. What catalogues?
Empty Outbox. Will do

Heart:
Confirm what you need to increase or decrease colour in each room. Our livingroom is mostly neutral, and it lacks colour, definetly something I need to look into
Identify what you need to increase or decrease softness in each room. I think this is allready good

Head:

Cook three meals at home this week. This will happen automaticly, we do cook quite often, nothing fancy though, but we need to eat something

Send out your invitation. Not going to happen, I have not planned anything, we might invite someone over but that we might do even without this cure

Also added to this, I'm planning to clean all windows, inside and outside, it's been so warm lately. I will also wash the sofa slipcovers. And I must take my grandmother's serger to maintenance, it's now sitting on top of our diningtable.

Here are some pictures of the before of the livingroom. In a way I'm very pleased with our livingroom, I would like to paint that ceiling white, to make the room feel larger and lighter. Atleast on winter time the dark ceiling makes the room seem bit depressing. Alana asked yesterday if wooden ceiling is standard here. I actually think it is not anymore normal to have a wooden ceiling, or if they are wood, they are still painted lighter. But our house is from the early 80's and at that time it was very fashionable to have a pine panel ceiling like this.

Dining table, picture taken from window side

Home entertainment unit, bookshelf and vitrine for glassware

I will not paint the ceiling during this cure, that is a major change and requires lot of time. But it's on the to-do list at some time in the future. From these two pictures you can see that our livingroom has lots of neutral colours, it is not following the 80-20 percent rule that Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan suggests in his book. His rule is that 80 percent of the colour in one room should be neutral and 20 percent strong colours, I would say our livingroom is 100 percent neutrals and now that I see these pictures it's obvious that this room is slightly boring.

Seating area

Piano, no one plays it, it is my sister's

With the white in the sofas and recliner the room seems fresher, but white either is not a strong colour, although I think it is not as neutral as all the brown. With all of this brown I'm having some trouble figuring out what strong colour would look good here. I know brown goes well with red, but I don't like red anymore (I used to, but I got bored of it).

Would you have some suggestions on colours and where to put it, I'd like something fresh and not too dark?