Painting the faux fireplace

Apparently, I can't go very long without painting or rearranging something in my house.  It's my creative outlet.  So even if every room in my house looks finished and put together, I just start getting this impulse to switch something up after a while.  

You may remember that about a year ago, I took down our faux fireplace and put a desk up here in its place.   

(See picture below)

Well, I liked the desk and it looked good there, but I just kept having this urge to paint the faux fireplace black.  I ignored it for weeks until finally I just had to do it and see what it looked like.  As much as me and the color white have a thing, surprisingly I am also falling in love with black.  Black makes such a statement.  And I've read that every room needs something black in it to ground it. 

So after painting the fireplace, I fell back in love with it.  And now, the desk has moved downstairs to the basement room and my fireplace is back upstairs, front and center.  

We also finally switched out the light fixture in here.  Since this room was originally intended to be a dining room, it had a chandelier hanging in it when we moved in.  And three years later, Tim was still hitting his head on it every time he forgot to duck when he walked through.  I just had the hardest time finding a flush mount light that I liked, so I stayed stuck with that ugly chandelier for way too long.  But finally, I settled on this light from Lowes.  It's simple and classy.  And bonus, it was fairly cheap.  We have this same light hanging in our foyer now too.  Eventually we plan to switch out all the out-dated flush mounts downstairs with this one. 

I hung our House of Belonging sign over the mantle, cut some fresh limbs from our tree outside, and stuck them in a vase.  This was a simple way to brighten it up and add a hint of Spring inside.  There is nothing like plants that liven up a room.

And I placed some birch logs on a basket to make it feel a little bit more like a real fireplace.

Do you ever get the urge to switch things up just for fun too?