Not everyone can afford a professional interior designer. But while an interior designer may be out of the question, you can use their design techniques to create the perfect arrangement for your living room furniture.

Best of all, you don’t have to lift a stick of living room furniture until you’re ready to put it right in its place. Gone are the hours of lifting heavy furniture, seeing if it works in a spot, and then moving it again to another part of the room.

While such experimentation can give you a good workout, you may end up finding that all the living room furniture you moved still doesn’t look right.

Far better to do all your planning and visualization before hand. You can do this one of two ways, the old analog method (pen and paper) or you can do it digitally on your computer. The results are the same, but these days it’s whatever format allows you to create and dream the easiest.

Let’s start with the basics first. When placing living room furniture, you need to follow a few rules that will make the process more enjoyable and more productive.

First, you want to always place the largest piece first into the layout, then work your way down to smaller and smaller pieces. Second, you want to always keep the main traffic areas clear. For example, you want a main traffic area that leads from the living room to the hall or the living room to any other room open so people can move easily without having to climb over or duck around living room furniture.

Start by measuring the room. Then transfer the measurements to a piece of paper or a drawing program on your computer. Make everything to scale, such as 1′ in your room equals 1/2″ on your diagram. This will make sizing everything easier since you simply halve the measurement to get the correct size on your layout. For example, a 6′ sofa is 3″ long in your plan.

Next, mark all the doors, windows and fireplace. Make an arc for the doors so you can see how much floor is consumed by the door opening and closing. Once these major design elements are marked, you can start moving the furniture around. This is where a piece of paper is easier. Start by making visual representations of each piece of living room furniture. This will make it easy to move them around the room virtually without having to move a muscle.

Now the fun begins. Once you have all your pieces of living room furniture it’s time to lay them out in the room. You want your largest piece to face the focal point of the room, for instance, a fireplace or a view window. It can even be the TV. If you’re going to use your living room for entertainment, group the other pieces so that everyone will be able to talk without raising their voice. For example, if you have a love seat you can put it at a 90-degree angle or perpendicular to the sofa. Keep arranging the living room furniture until it looks good to you.

Before you start the heavy lifting, double check the traffic patterns. You want at least 3′ between furniture in the major traffic areas and at least 18″ between a major piece and a secondary piece, such as between the sofa and a coffee table. As far as the major traffic areas, more is always better.

Now you can move your living room furniture with confidence, knowing that chances are very good that you’ll only have to move it once. This will make rearranging your furniture a joy, giving your room a new look without a major workout.

Author Bio: Jesse Akre owns Edenvale Shoppes and hosts numerous furniture and furnishings for any home whether it be garden bench or end tables styles and designs.

Category: Home Management
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