Yesterday, we finally had a chance to take advantage of the Starbucks Happy Hour Frappuccino special which we have been meaning to go to ever since it started on May 4.

Side note: If you haven’t heard,  the Starbucks special runs until  May 13 and all frappuccinos are 1/2 off during 3pm-5pm!

After that refreshing frappuccino break, we on our way to check out furniture options for our new place, specifically our grand room. We consciously opted out for a living room in our house since its one of those rooms that rarely ever gets used. Instead we came up with the grand room concept which we will be using as both our family and living room space.

Since our house is a custom home, one of the many challenges is imagining how big or small our spaces really are since there is no model home to reference.  Because of this its tricky coming up with furniture configurations that work for this room. We have been using programs such as Sketchup to play around with 3D interpretations of the furniture placements. We want the furniture to fit properly into the 26’x28′ space without the sitting area looking too empty or over crowded.

Below is a picture of our layout in the kitchen and grand room. We essentially have no walls in our grand room and as such will be floating our furniture in the center of the room in the 18’x18′ space. The entertainment center will be sitting right across the sitting area (opposite to the kitchen cabinets wall). On one side of the sitting area is our formal dining room and on the other side we have a large 16′ sliding pocket door which oversees the covered lanai/patio and backyard. Directly behind the sitting area is our kitchen and eat-in dining area with another sliding door that leads to our outdoor kitchen.

The kitchen and grand room area will share a double tray ceiling. This means the space around the dotted lines will be 10′ in height and the space inside the dotted lines will be 12′ in height.  Because of the high ceilings and tile/hardwood floors we are a little concerned about echo in the room especially when we have a large gathering or when we are watching movies. My thought is to furnish the space with upholstered sofas, a large shaggy rug, upholstered kitchen/dining chairs and fabric window coverings in both the grand room and kitchen. Satpreet wants to go with a leather furniture due to its comfort. I agree that the leather sofas we saw were extremely comfortable, but I’m not sure how much sound they will dampen. We have narrowed down our choices to about 4 potential sofas (upholstered and leather) each with different configurations. The grand room is still a work in progress.

On our way home, we drove by our lot to see if any further work had been done that day. The area is a gated community which at the moment is left open during the day due to construction, but locked at night. We don’t get the code to enter the community until our house closing, so if we want to see progress we have to go during the day. However, since our lot is on the corner we were able to shine the car’s high beams onto our house, but unfortunately we didn’t see any further work done on it.

On our way out, I took a quick picture of our community sign at night.