Easy Steps to Furniture Arrangements 2

If you remember the grid paper I suggested you use for recording the measurements of your room; we are now ready to use this lay out by placing the furniture to be used in this room on it.

Furniture Cut-outs and Templates

To be able to get the correct scale of your furniture pieces to the grid paper, you will have to either use scale models made from paper, which you cut out and place on the lay out of your room.

Paper cut-outs can be made by measuring your furniture pieces and then using a ruler or another piece of grid or graph paper draw each piece. Let me give you a few ideas about drawing your own cut outs.

• ¼ inch on the ruler equals 1 foot of your furniture.
• For a 6 x 3 foot sofa you will draw two lines parallel to each other that measure on the ruler, 1 ½ inches. Connect these lines by drawing 2 lines, also parallel to each other that measure ¾ inch on your ruler.
• To draw a round table that measures 24 inches, draw a square that measures on your ruler, ½ inch, then round the corners to make a circle.

Or, if you like, I located a website which has these cut-outs ready for you to print-out and cut for your room. Here’s the link: http://www.homeexpo.com/guides/cut-outs.aspx

You can also find paper cut-outs in a lot of decorating books, especially those which are written for the do-it-yourselfer. One book, is Better Homes and Garden Decorating Book. I believe Martha Stewart may also have a decorating book published which gives paper cut-outs of furniture in the last pages of the book.

Templates are plastic sheets with spaces cut out to represent different types of furniture pieces. These can usually be obtained at business supply stores, and sometimes stationary stores.

Rules of Placement

• Place large pieces first (on your grid paper before you move your furniture piece)
• Add other pieces until you create an arrangement that satisfies you
• Keep in mind the functions of your room
• Remember to keep traffic patterns (lanes) open, or purposely re-direct traffic by the placement of your furniture. An example would be if your living room has an entry door which opens, allowing traffic to walk through the conversational grouping, move the sofa or chairs, so that the door opens behind the grouping instead of into the grouping.
• Balance your furniture so that the room does not appear or feel heavier at one end than the other.
• Remember you may not be able to alter the shape of your room physically without a major remodeling job, but you can alter how it appears by the scale and proportion of your furniture pieces, color, textures and patterns, and the use of lines and forms.

Types of Furniture Arrangements

Parallel – is often the only arrangement that can be used in a small room. In the home I spent my childhood and early teens, the living room was small. One entered it from the dining room (where the entry door was located), thus the only way to arrange this room was sofa and club chair on one wall, piano and TV on the opposite wall. The end wall were double French doors leading to the bedroom my sisters and I shared.