Neither DP nor I are very inspired when it comes to interior design, and I'm just wondering if there's a better way to layout our living room.
These are the pictures from when we first bought it, and I'm not sure if we can do anything other than the current set up (as marked up). The room needs to have the table and the piano as there's no space for them elsewhere. We wondered about knocking through into the kitchen, but there's no utility so we'd have the noise of the washing machine and all it would really achieve would be the table a bit further away. Our current sofa was fine with only one DC, but now we have 2 (and the oldest is a lot bigger!) it's the source of arguments about who gets to sit on it. We could fit a bigger sofa in the same space, but we don't want to buy anything while we're not sure about everything.
An obvious swap would be the table and the sofa, but currently the position of the sofa means we can keep a vague eye on the DC while they're playing outside, and it's nice to look out over the garden. We thought about an extension to turn the kitchen into a kitchen diner (which a lot of the houses on the street have done), but the cost of extensions now are crazy. What the floorplan calls the "breakfast area" is actually just more kitchen cabinets, so I'm not sure why it has that name - you certainly couldn't get a table in without taking the units out.
In one of our previous houses we had the table behind a sofa, which worked quite well, but the fireplace doesn't really permit that here.
I think probably the answer is we commit to this layout and get a sofa that suits everyone better, but I wanted to make sure we weren't missing any clever thoughts.