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What is the best way to see if the furniture I like will fit in a room?
How many times have you purchased furniture or accessories that you loved in the store, but when you got it home it was too big or small for the room. We have all done this; so don't be embarrassed by this typical mistake.
When decorating a room it is difficult to tell what furniture will fit, or how it should be arranged, without some planning. There are three popular ways that we like to create a room plan:
The first method uses actual sized cutouts of the furniture to be arranged in the room. The cutouts are often made of newspapers, and are made to full size. The cutouts are fun to arrange in real time experimenting with the different arrangements and possibilities. Using this method, you can see exactly how various arrangements affect traffic patterns and add or subtract from the overall room. This method is particularly good for empty rooms. The difficulty with this method is that the cutouts are difficult to make because of their size and can be unwieldy, also, you can't take the cutouts with you on shopping trips to see if new ideas and selections will work in the room.
The second method, and better one for most folks, involves measuring and drawing a floor plan on graph paper. To create the floor plan, each wall, window, door, outlet and other permanent structures in the room are measured and drawn onto a piece of graph paper. On the graph paper, each square is made to represent a physical measurement, typically 1-foot, or 1/2 foot, creating a scale drawing of your floor plan. The floor plan will allow you to sketch in various furniture and accessories, or use scale cutouts. Play with layout, experiment with arrangement, and verify the overall plan before purchase. The floor plan original should be photocopied, and copies can be used for your records or with various store designers to help formulate the master plan.
The third method is the most advanced, and best for the technically savvy. Using your PC, you can purchase an interior design program that lets you design your room in a virtual environment, changing flooring, wall coverings, paint color, furniture, accessories, and art, and examining these changes in 3D on your computer screen. One of the major issues of working with full sized cutouts or floor plans is that the two dimensional representations can often lead to crowded designs. Two-dimensional design does not allow the full visualization of how much room an items height, weight and bulk can take up, especially when implementing a sofa or armoire. The 3 dimensional visualization provided by these programs allows the user to fully experience the room, and verify every aspect of the design, while still providing the two dimensional layout tools that most of us are comfortable with. The program we recommend for the non-professional is
3D Home Interiors from Broderbund.
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