Hmmm--Can't believe there are no comments after Sabrina's post.
I see you out there with those chainsaws Newbies. Unless your heading to Idaho you can put them away while we get some sand and rock in that new tank! 
Hopefully at this point you have a tank that is free of leaks and all the mechanical stuff is working correctly. If not you want to fix it now before going further. You also want to check out your temperature now that the tank has had a couple of days to stabilize. Use a good in-tank thermometer. Avoid those liquid crystal ones that you paste onto the outside of the tank, they're pretty but not very accurate. I keep my tank at 80 degrees but anywhere in the range of 78-82° F is just fine. If your room has wide temperature swings you may want to check the temp at the days high and low points. The temperature should hold within 2° F. If it doesn't during the low temperature part of the day you may want to add another heater to the system. With my 130 the heater in the sump is nearly constantly on. The heater in the tank cycles on an off and the back up in the tank remains off.
Now, before any thing else goes into the tank, is a good time to get some background water quality data. First get your salinity to the proper level then check pH, alkalinity (I forgot that test in the earlier part of this thread
).) You might want to check calcium levels too for future reference. If the pH is in the range of 8.0-8.4 and alkalinity of 3.0-5.0 meq/L (dKH 8.5-14) you should be in pretty good shape. Don't go to a lot of trouble trying to adjust things at this point as things are going to start to change when we get sand and rock in your tank. Just note them as your baseline parameters.
Time for some sand. Now for those of you with deep pockets the way to go is with all LS. For Chicopee Phill's tank, a 110, we are probably looking at a 60" X 18" X 24" it will take about 190 lbs of aragonite (calcium carbonate) sand with a weight of 75 lbs per cubic foot. That would run him about $500 to $600 depending on the sand cost and shipping. The alternative is to go with an aragonite plain sand base and use some LS to activate it.
In option one you will be happy to know that your tank will go through the cycle faster and you will not probably contend with as long a battle with algae. If you are on a budget, like most people, you will need to make do with choice two. I'm going to proceed here using the second option, as it is the most popular.
Choosing base sand is important. Although some feel that silica sands and such are OK to use, I always use aragonite. As the bed develops there will be anaerobic zones in the lower levels. The bacteria in those zones produce acids such as vinegar. Using aragonite will neutralize these anaerobic acids and at the same time add some calcium into the system. This may not be a major factor in maintaining calcium or alkalinity levels but it can't hurt.
The sand should also be sugar sized or somewhat finer. Unless you are completely new to RC you probably know that Home Depot carries a sand called Southdown Play Sand. This stuff meets the above requirements and costs $5 - $7 per 50 lb bag. Pretty hard to beat for the budget conscious. You can also buy other brand of aragonite from the LFS or on-line but they will cost you more and, some cases, a lot more.
For a tank like Phill's I would go with 150 lbs of Southdown and then use about 50 lbs of LS to seed it. You can go with less seed sand, some people count on the bacteria from their LR for seed, but you are really going to slow things down.
Having obtained the Southdown there are two methods to add it. The sloppy fast method--put a bucket under the overflow on the tank and just dump in the sand through the water in the tank. The neat slow method--take out all the water, add the sand, cover the sand with a plastic garbage bag and slowly add the water back in. This latter method reduces the resulting sandstorm but, at least IMO, not enough to justify moving all the water around. WaterKeeper is inherently lazy.
Another nice thing about the "sloppy method" is if you are careful you can catch the displaced water from the overflow and get an idea of how much volume the sand takes up in your tank. This can be handy info in the future.
With either method you can expect a sandstorm. With the "sloppy" method it takes about 3-5 days to fully clear, with the "neat" method perhaps a day or two less.
At this point another thing that you can add to your collection of tank purchases can help. A hang on the tank canister filter using a polishing filter can be used after about 48 hours to help clear the sand storm. Be prepared to change filters often as they will clog fast but it will speed things up. Clogged filters can be soaked in vinegar and un-clogged. Just rinse them well. A canister filter runs about $50 and is so handy for doing things like running carbon or cleaning up a bacteria bloom that I think every serious reefer should have one.
You don't really need to wait very long to add the Live Sand to the bed. Give it a day or two to clear some and you are ready to go. I like to get LS from several different sources. I think it adds diversity to the tank. Some sands are heavy on worms, some on micro starfish and others in copepods. For the 50 lbs for this tank I might buy 10 lbs from five sources. The drawback here is increased shipping and handling charges. I do think it may be worth it however as detrivore (sand critter) kits cost as much as $100 and may not be needed with a diverse mixed bed.
Once the LS arrives, carefully ( try not to restart the sandstorm) add it over the base bed. Once in place, I like to take a plastic dowel or someother non-metallic, round object and poke some of the LS into the base bed. I do this every few inches to help seed the beds lower levels.
Well, I'm going to run out of time today so I'll need to tackle LR addition next time.
Here is some info on sand beds from our Biology Droid, Doc Ron-
Deep Sand Beds (DSB)
Get out those flashlights with the red lenses. Your gonna want to watch them pods!