Planning the Perfect Living Space

Planning the Perfect Living Space - For You!

The cold and rainy weather is here and we are going to be spending more and more time indoors. After being outside so much during the warmer months sometimes at this time of the year I can feel trapped inside. If your home is feeling like it’s closing in on you, it might just need a little kick to give it some life. Check out the tips below on space planning and use the complimentary tool from Outrageous Interiors to create your ideal floorplan. Arranging your existing furniture, art and accessories in a new way can make a tired old room feel brand new!

Ready for Change

First, really think about how the area is used and the activities that take place in the room. You may have a formal living room with gorgeous exotic hardwoods, but if your children spend a lot of time in it on the floor playing games, you may want to move a rug from another part of the house to give them a soft place to sit (and to prevent wear and tear on your floors!) At this point you will also want to take a look at the current room and take notes about what is working and what you would like to improve. Do you continually find yourself moving chairs from one room to another to accommodate guests? Maybe you need more seating in one area and less in another, or the areas need to be repurposed to better fit your needs.

For Good Measure

You’ll want to work from a floor plan that is scaled to the correct dimensions of your room, so take measurements of the walls and all the structural features such as doors, windows, entranceways, closets, etc… Click the floorplan icon for a space planning tool compliments of Outrageous Interiors that lets you easily enter the measurements of the room, add and arrange furniture and accessories and save and print your plans.

Taking Inventory

Once you have your scaled floor plan set up and an idea in your mind of how the room needs to function, look around your entire house for items that you may want to use in the room and take their measurements.

Check out your storage areas for items like Aunt Beth’s dresser that you really love but never used because it didn’t match your bedroom furnishings. It might be the perfect place to store CD’s, DVD’s and games in your den. And remember, you aren’t really moving the heavy furniture at this point so don’t be stingy, it is better to have more than you need to choose from than not enough.

You’re Virtually Done

Look at the “blank slate” of the scaled floor plan as it is now in the space planning program and visualize the traffic pattern of the room. You will want to enter and move about the room with ease. Consider often overlooked things like windows you like to open, as well as the room’s entrances and closets. Using the software, create icons for your potential furnishings from the list you made earlier. Make sure that you resize the items to match their measurements. Move the icons around to find which placements work best for you, making sure that traffic can flow around all the items in the room. With this software, you can save multiple versions of the same room so that you can compare printouts side by side.

While your personal style and taste will ultimately determine the arrangement of your rooms, there are many guidelines the experts say you may want to consider.  Click Here for some tips from the “design” side of space planning.

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