There’s no point working up an unladylike sweat or breaking a nail you worked so hard to grow out, by shoving heavy furniture around before you know where in the room you want to place it. And there’s even less point in creating stress in a happy home by making your Significant Other shove the furniture around while you point and think and change your mind a dozen times… right?
Now, you’ve probably heard this before:
Before you do a thing, measure your room and draw it out on a piece of graph paper — say, 1 foot to a half-inch, or a quarter-inch if it’s a big room). Don’t forget to mark the size and location of all windows, doors, electrical outlets, baseboard radiators, and whatever else might be a permanent fixture in the room. Got it?
Now cut out little pieces of paper to represent the pieces of furniture you’re looking to place or arrange (drawn to the same scale as your room plan, of course). Moving bits of paper around to see how your furniture fits will be a lot easier than moving the furniture itself!
This is also a handy technique if you’re looking to buy new furniture — before you fall in love with the massive L-shaped sectional, play with the graph paper and see if it fits before you get it paid for and delivered.
And now for the really good news — because who among us has a piece of graph paper lying around, in the normal course of things? If you liked My Virtual Model, you’ll love BHG’s dandy little Arrange-a-Room online planning tool. Basically, if you’ve got a browser and you’ve got Flash, you’ve got (something better than) graph paper…
And you should only have to shove that furniture around once, when the planning is done. Bliss!
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