Family Room Floor Plan

Since we moved to Hazard Ave, we've struggled with the furniture arrangement in the family room. Our goal is to fit the maximum amount of people in the room and have a comfortable spot to view the TV.

We're pretty much starting over from scratch in this room, so we have an opportunity to change the layout from its current configuration, which looks like this

To get a comfortable view of the TV from the couch, one of us always has to lay down. Quite frankly, that makes eating dinner in front of the TV kind of hard (and let's face it, Chris and I occasionally eat a meal or two in front of the TV). Plus, there's not a whole lot of seating for guests.

We could add another chair, like in the drawing below, but then the best seats in the room would be the side chairs. I'd rather get comfy on the couch.

We briefly considered a love seat instead of two chairs, but this actually limited our seating even further because really, only one person can comfortably sit on a love seat. It also still leaves one of us eating our dinner lying down.

That brought us to putting the sofa directly across from the TV.

As you can see, that's not going to work either. The sofa would block all the traffic flow in and out of the room, and the two chairs would probably look weird blocking the TV like that.

Finally, we arrived at the "TV over the Fireplace" solution. 

We were reluctant to put a TV over our only fireplace in the house, but as you can see, it really does give us plenty of seating and allows for the best flow of traffic. 

Where do you stand on the "TV over the Fireplace" debate?
Have you done it in your own home?