I finally finished tinkering with my layout. As I mentioned in the comments of the post below, I had to turn the header image-handling off in this theme and use a plug-in called Dynamic Headers in order to make it look close to the way I envisioned. I also incorporated my color scheme throughout, but I tried not to overwhelm the site with brown and gold. I allowed gray to be a neutral color to give it some balance.

I am going to incorporate the image in the header with a larger design, but I think this is enough for now.

My main area of concern is the sidebars. I’m afraid there’s too much brown there. I tried both black and gold for the widget headers, but neither looked good. Ideas?