The TV Situation that I Loathe

The TV nook in our house has been a bit of a problem since Day 1. It's become an even bigger problem now that our fireplace next to it is becoming so bee-uuu-tee-ful. 
Our TV sits on a cherry TV stand that we bought for our previous (and very first) TV waaaaay back in the day. We upgraded to the flat screen LCD when we lived in our townhouse. Now, we have the same narrow TV stand and our giant (or too small, if you ask Brian) TV showcased in a media nook. Ugh. This is not exactly the look I'm going for. And to make matters worse, we bought these cheapy alien-feet speaker stands for our surround sound system when we first got married, which was fine in our first few homes, but now we keep all of our speakers up by the TV. The surround sound system is 9 years old and on it's last legs, so there's no point in trying to achieve the "surround" sound experience with them. I keep insisting to Brian we get one of those new sound bars with a wireless subwoofer, but he's insisting on a different sound system that's more than twice the price. But I digress.
Anyway....so here it is. The corner I loathe. 

So, as I was taking a break from my fireplace project, I had a sudden realization. It wasn't a major-transforms-the-whole-room-realization, but it was one of those "why didn't I think of that before" moments. And the realization was this: there was no reason I needed to keep those cheapy alien-feet speaker stands. They're so ug-o, and just make the media nook area that much MORE ug-o.

So, I hollered up to Brian, "I'M RE-CONFIGURING THE SURROUND SOUND!!!!" and got to work unscrewing the speakers and arranging them on the TV stand. And soon I'll be listing the speaker stands on Craigslist so someone else can hate enjoy them.

Much better. It's still an ugly corner, but now it's not super ugly.

 In the corner's defense, I've never given this area any love before. This is the first step I've ever taken towards beautifying it. I'd really love to get a great piece of furniture to put the TV on, or possibly do built-ins in this nook. And wouldn't an accent color or wallpaper look amazing at the back of the nook?...but, alas, with Baby Boy Logue on the way, this area might have to wait a bit longer.
Do you have an area of your house that really bothers you? What have you done to try to fix it? Cheers!