Downsizing Your Living Space- How To Get The Sofa Through The Door

Moving out of your parents house and in to your own place can be exciting; it brings the kind of independence that only living on your own can but it can also create problems for you if you’re moving in to a living space that’s smaller than the one you’re used to

Being independent and finally getting to live on your own in some place other than your college dorm is one of the pinnacles of adult life. You never forget your first apartment because it’s the one you work the hardest on. You measure your success by the quality of your living space so you work hard to make it just right. Unfortunately not everyone manages to make their apartment in to a comfy cozy place to live in for the next five years but here’s some helping tips to give you a good start.

Measure everything:
Measure the space you’ve got to decorate before you do anything else and if there’s a room that has a slanting roof or other odd angles, decide how you intend to deal with them instead of just stuffing the room with furniture and hopping it’ll all turn out to be a good fit. One thing that you need to measure is the door, all the doors, so you know just how wide a sofa (or any other furniture for that matter) can fit through.

Furniture should be practical and comfy:
As opposed to chic and overly expensive designer furniture, your emphasis should be on practical pieces of furniture that’ll help you avoid clutter and organize your things better. What few people realize is that good design has a lot to do with a clean look. Using the room measurements that you’ve taken make sure that everything can fit comfortably in the room. Make a room map to be accurate and if the rooms are small, don’t buy huge pieces of furniture.

Find a focal point for every room and find the dark spot:
For every room, find a focal point which will determine what direction the furniture will face. It might be the window or the part of the room with the best light. It could be an ordinary wall where you put up fixtures and frames or just your TV. As for the dark spots, they’ll be areas that you don’t want to attract too much attention to. Decide how you’re going to phase them into the background either by using less lighting in the area or by concealing it with furniture. This area could be the odd angled wall that I mentioned earlier.

Don’t forget; you need to be able to move around
Don’t fill every space you’ve got with furniture. Whether your rooms are small or big, the space to move around conveniently will have to be planned out. Make sure you’ve got a good flow of the traffic and the functionality of the room isn’t affected in any way.

Three basic functions:
Your living space should provide you with three basic rooms for three basic functions. A bedroom and bathroom, a kitchen and a living room, to sleep, cook and eat and entertain your friends. Don’t clutter the rooms with additional functionality if you haven’t got the space for it.

Arranging Furniture…Rearranging Furniture

Where to put the Sofa? Rearranging the rearranged furniture

I spend countless hours going through magazines, catalogs and exploring sites just looking at chic sofa sets and cushions and stunning furniture layouts. There was a time when I thought that the look that came from these arrangements could only be achieved with that kind of furniture and that it’s pretty useless looking at interior design catalogs since I’m never really going to be able to afford a living room revamp as it is. upholstering doesn’t appeal to me because I can’t do it myself and the economy being what it is, I can’t dish out cash to have someone do it for me. so what I’ll normally do, when I’m not even up for changing the cushions and throws is rearrange the furniture.

A good way to start out with furniture rearrangement (from what I’ve learnt) is to always define your must haves, for example if your living room leads to the backyard, you can’t have anything blocking the way. You might want to avoid carpeting the area and just do with a simple rug in order to avoid having to clean dirt off later.

Someone once suggested that I should inventory all the furniture in a room before rearranging it, Just so I don’t forget to pick out the place for something but I find making a nice illustrated layout for it to be better. It’s what HGTV suggests. I prefer it because it gives me an entire picture of where I’m going to put what instead of just giving me the number of furniture items that I have.

Then there’s the whole question of just how many ways can I rearrange the same sofa and coffee table? Furniture galleries have always been my aid when it comes down to it. Interior warrior has some fantastic furniture and a really great gallery. Even if I don’t follow the layout as it is, I can usually pull something good off.

Take these two furniture layouts from Interior Warrior. While the two sofa sets are almost the same, they’re arranged different and look amazing either way.