Decorating Dilemma: Why is color so hard?

One of the many areas I struggle with is the idea of decorating. I want a pretty house, but I'm really bad at picking colors and arranging things. If only I could have a cute magazine worthy house, but alas, mine is just a mess.

When we moved in to our house, they had only painted a few walls. Almost every room was a dingy, dirty, chipped white. I've been slowly getting things painted and organized, and now I'm ready to tackle the scourge of our household- the basement. UGH. It's dark, ugly, and a mess. A friend is going to help me organize it, and my FIL is working on building me a wall organizer.

Not a great picture, but these are the colors I'm looking at.

Which leads to my decorating dilemma. COLOR! What color do I paint it? I had envisioned a nice soft yellow to make my dark basement seem brighter. But hubby nixed that, because apparently, he's not fond of yellow. When I was looking at paint chips in the store, he really liked this light green. I thought it would be too dark, so I grabbed a lighter shade as well. My friend thought it would be good to do the dark one as an accent wall, the other three walls the lighter green, and then my wall unit could be yellow.

Fortunately, I've learned to buy paint samples first and make sample boards. The result was less than pleasing. My two greens are too similar in color, so I'm not sure the accent thing is going to work. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the yellow and wish I could do it on my walls. But I think it'll still be nice on the wall unit.

So now I'm rethinking what I want to do. How do you make a dark basement with dark carpet seem lighter and brighter?