My husband and I recently reorganized the furniture in my living room as we often do. We like to change it up on a regular basis. We wanted to give it a fresh look and we wanted a bit of a new perspective, so we got to work and started moving the pieces around like a game of Tetris. Or maybe a game of Gridlock, because there wasn’t really any time pressure. But that’s beside the point.
We rearrange furniture throughout the house so often that we start to get really technical about it. What will the room be used for? What is the focal point of the room? Where will you spending your most time in the room? Will it be in the evening, when you’ll be getting mostly natural light? Or will it be during the day where the sun should be shining strong? These and many more questions contribute to our thought process as we make the whole thing happen.
As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, particular situation we were reorganizing our living room. To be completely honest, we don’t spend all that much time there. When we do spend time there, it’s mostly at night time on the weekends when we are trying to unwind. Otherwise we’re too busy working in the office or in the kitchen.
Considering when we spend our time there it became quite obvious what the focal point of the room was – our TV. The TV is pretty much always running when we finally settle into the sectional we cherish so much, but use less often than we probably should. With the TV as our focal point it was time to start the organization. We chose a place in the corner where the television was uncluttered by the rest of the room and also didn’t take up too much of a footprint. The rest came from this point of reference.
With the focal point in place we considered where we would be sitting. On our sectional, of course. But where on our sectional? We arranged the sectional so that when we were sitting in our default positions our bodies formed two corners of an equilateral triangle. The third point was our television. Doing it this way guaranteed that no matter where we stretched out on the sectional we would have a good view of the tv and we’d be able to hear it relatively evenly.
Since we would be spending most of our time there in the evenings, it was also important to consider how we’d be lighting the room. The ceiling lights in the room are fantastic, but given their location they can be a little intrusive with how bright they are. We decided that we would keep them on a dim setting, or even off, and to compensate we brought in some matching floor lamps. They brightened up the room nicely without being too aggressive on our eyes.
All that was left was the decoration, which was a relatively straight forward task given all we had to do was arrange it around the furniture in a balanced fashion. Everything already matched, because we had long before gone through the process of evening up colors.
We’re left with a brand new living room experience. All it took was a couple of hours work, some determination, and some creativity. It’s nice to feel like you have a new room again within your old home. It injects a little inspiration, making you realize how much a little effort can pay off. Give it a try and see how it works out for you!