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.

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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