Assuming they hired a professional designer to do the model living room, what I see is that under the best of circumstances, that living room is awkwardly set up. In the model room, there is space for three, maybe 4 people to sit. Only one seat directly faces the TV set. Look at the furniture in that room. One small sofa or loveseat. One armchair. One TV stand. One end table. One large coffee table that was chosen to fill up the empty space in the center of the room to make it look more furnished. Imagine that room without the coffee table and it starts to look a lot like the OP�s room. There are three lamps, one of which appears to block part of the TV. And then at least 4 plants, to make the room appear more furnished and welcoming. I think they did a wonderful job making that room look open and inviting, and hiding the more obvious flaws in the design of the room. The room�s layout simply doesn�t function well. Either you have the sofa on the wall in the model room, and then you have a hard time watching TV, or you put the sofa on the window wall so you can see the TV set, and then you lose the view out the windows and have an awkward layout. OP, it�s not you. It�s the room. Working with the furniture you have, the first thing I�d do is take out the two small chairs. They don�t work with the rest of the furniture. Then I�d try to put the sofa on the wall where it is in the model room, and buy a table top TV swivel stand so that you could easily watch TV from there. Move the blue chair to the same position as the woven chair in the model picture and place an end table between the sofa and the chair. Down the line, look for a coffee table similar to the one in the model picture�glass or Lucite to keep the space looking open, and slightly oversized to fill the space better. And maybe a smaller unit to hold the TV.

Mrs. Pete, my kitchen is 18 feet long and just shy of 14 feet wide. I am one of the few U-shaped kitchen remodels of late. This kitchen suits our needs pretty darn well (I will not say perfectly) and we are a family of 5. I will post my link and some of the thought process we went through to help you visualize. Remodeling our kitchen really allowed me to design my storage much better and that has cleared off my counters, making my kitchen far more usable. So the good news for you is that if you had a rental home 20 years ago with a U and yo liked it, things have only gotten better. Your storage will be more efficient and you should be able to eliminate cabinets and yet store as much or more. Note that I did keep one cabinet in glass over part of my peninsula, but then we need a LOT of food storage with two teens and a near-teenager. As an example we have a cabinet strictly devoted to cereal storage. So if you took my kitchen and added two feet in length and one in width? The width answer is very simple: I would add a foot of walkway at the end of the peninsula and down the length. I hit all the minimums, but roomier would be nicer. Two more feet on the room's length would give you room to have bar stools and a table. But, do you really need bar stools at this point in life? With a large group you probably wouldn't be putting people at both the table and the counter to eat. Better to get a table with leaves in it for a larger crowd. Then that table can be folded back to a manageable size when it's just the two of you. Again, give yourself the elbow room. I might make the base of my U longer. As is commonly taught on GW, prep zone and clean-up zone run into each other when you only have one sink in your kitchen. A little more room might alleviate the crunch. I do like having a double-bowl sink, where the right sink is for dirty dishes and the left for prep work. But really, if you look at my kitchen, most people would say the stove should have moved to the back wall, removing the need for the island mount fan and opening up the space. And a large peninsula without a stove would be better for serving food buffet style. I tend to agree that if I were designing from scratch I would place the stove there. Another thing some posters here advocate is for moving your sink to the peninsula (or island). The reason to move the sink to the peninsula is that you will face your guests as you prep the food. On the other hand, most of the time, I don't have guests waching me cook, so the window is nice to look out. Hope this helps give some of the pros and cons to think about when planning your U shaped kitchen! Colorfast Here is a link that might be useful: Colorfast's nearly done U Shaped Kitchen

I agree with Fori, you are talking to the wrong sales people. For years early in my career, seems almost all I did was change out sliders to french doors. For your opening size and situation, you could use several combinations of door and sidelight combos. For example, a pair of 32" swinging french, with a 32" fixed sidelight. If your rough opening won't accept that, perhaps a 30" sidelight and/or 30" doors.

We replaced our French patio door with a slider last year (here 27 years) and we are sorry we didn't do it much sooner. It is much easier to operate since the french door was so heavy and it was a pain to open and close as compared to the slider which operates beautifully. We didn't replace it with a French styled slider, ours has minimal casing to open-up the view. It gives our room a lift.