Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Quick Tip: Visualizing a Furniture Layout

I love to draw out room plans with a pencil and a piece graph paper. It's actually a hobby. In high school I'd get so excited when a new Ikea catalog arrived in the mail. I'd spend hours picking out furniture for my first apartment then draw up to scale furniture arrangements. Now that I think of it, that's kind of a weird hobby for a high school kid. What was my point? Oh right, floor plans - because I enjoy doing it so much I was drawing out possible furniture arrangements for the guest room/office before we even ripped up the old carpet. My only problem with scale drawn floor plan is that although they help you see how furniture pieces will fit in a space it's difficult for me to imagine how the space will fell to move around in.

My solution - I create full size newspaper templates of the furniture I would like to place in the room and move it around the space. It makes it much easier to see what works and what doesn't. For example, once I laid out the desk and futon I could see that it might be difficult to walk around the right side of the desk. I could see one of us bumping into it a lot. That is how I figured out that the new side tables should be less than 18" leaving at least 2' of space to navigate in and out of the desk.

furniture template layout

This is such a simple exercise but it will save you the aggravation of carting home a new piece of furniture only to realize that it won't actually work in your space. I definitely recommend you give it try next time you are rearranging a room in your home.

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6 comments:

  1. Great idea! And loving the new blog header =)

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  2. @Jennie Prince Thanks Jennie, I'm slowing giving the blog a mini face lift

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  3. ha, I totally did this in high school/growing up as well! We moved a lot and I had my furniture measured, so I would create to-scale reproductions of my bedroom on graph paper, complete with cut-out graph paper pieces of my furniture and have at it! I also love mechanical drawing in high school...in the days before Auto-Cad =P

    btw-also love the new header! been drafting new stuff for my blog as well: spring cleaning! =)

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  4. @Juliette Juliette we sound like kindred spirits :) Forget Auto CAD, I prefer a pencil and graph paper any day!

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  5. Thumbs up to that.A simply great idea.

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  6. Great article. Your article is very helpful. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

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