As your living room needs to be a comfortable and welcoming feature in your home, it pays to take a little time with the planning of it. There are many different factors that you can take into consideration when you are trying to get the design and layout just right, and without that planning, the finished product might not look the way you hoped it would look!
Make the Most of Every Part of the Room
One of the best ways to make sure that you are getting the right design for your room is to make use of a scale drawing. This is one of the tricks that interior designers use – you might think that they simply arrive with new furniture and accessories and just know where it is going to go, but there is a lot more to the process than that! By having a scale drawing of the room, you can see where your furniture will fit (make sure you mark on the doors and windows), and you can play around with the design without the need to haul the furniture around every time you change your mind.
The placement of doors and windows in a room is important because you might have plans to put a couch against a wall, for example, but if the couch is too big, then you could end up blocking access or natural light and you need to think again.
Plan Your Floor Space
Careful arrangement of your furniture could mean that you can make more use of the space. It could be that you need your living room to be multi-functional – maybe you need a seating area for watching TV and a play area for the kids. Even in a fairly small room, there are ways of achieving this, and this is where your floor plan is going to come in useful again. You can work out in advance how much space you have for each item of furniture.
It does help to work out in advance who you are planning the room for. For example, you might be planning the room for yourself if you do not have children, but a more multi-functional room will be needed if there are other people in the house. They might want to have the room as a place to watch TV, while you might prefer to create a den for this purpose and leave the living room as a place to just relax in.
When your living room needs to be practical as well as a relaxing space, then pay attention to your accessories and the often-neglected areas such as the windows. You can take the opportunity to replace curtains with shutters, and this will help to make the room look bigger while at the same time giving you the chance to let in more natural light and add extra insulation in the room.
Your living room could become the hub of the home, and if you plan it carefully, it will be able to offer you everything that you want from it, whether you want a relaxing space, a family room, or a space in which to entertain.