Arranging Furniture? Tape it Out First!
Here's how to use painter's tape to catch any interior space-planning mistakes early
Space planning is crucial to any good design. Your design may look fabulous on paper, but furnishings that don't fit it can spell disaster for your project.
Take this family-room design I'm working on, for example. The installers were due to arrive and hook up the flat-screen TV. I could have had them install it based off of my space plan alone, but I'm the type who needs to feel my space to truly visualize it. We did not have all of our furnishings yet, so I used green painter's tape to layout my missing pieces. This enabled me to be confident in my decision for the TV placement without the furniture being there.
Read on for a quick guide to using painter's tape to plan out a furniture layout and catch any mistakes before ordering or installing permanent fixtures.
Take this family-room design I'm working on, for example. The installers were due to arrive and hook up the flat-screen TV. I could have had them install it based off of my space plan alone, but I'm the type who needs to feel my space to truly visualize it. We did not have all of our furnishings yet, so I used green painter's tape to layout my missing pieces. This enabled me to be confident in my decision for the TV placement without the furniture being there.
Read on for a quick guide to using painter's tape to plan out a furniture layout and catch any mistakes before ordering or installing permanent fixtures.
Once the area rug was in position, I placed the daybed. I started with that piece because I could only go so far with it before it would hit the fireplace hearth or the built-in cabinet.
After I had the daybed determined, I then taped off an area for the sofa along the long wall.
Once the sofa was taped off, I found its center and ran a tape measure to the wall where the TV would sit. You may not want your sofa exactly centered with the TV, but in this case I did.
Running the tape across the room allowed me to find the spot where the center of the TV should be. Then I could also tape off the position for the credenza below it.
Running the tape across the room allowed me to find the spot where the center of the TV should be. Then I could also tape off the position for the credenza below it.
Once the TV and credenza placement was taped off, I brought my clients back into the room to determine their most comfortable TV-viewing height. So now, the TV installers knew exactly where to hang the TV, and we could all feel confident that it was going to work with our furniture layout.
Double checking your plan is always important. We did end up shifting the media center's position by about 6 inches. If I would have just gone off my drawing we would not have been as happy with the outcome. Rehanging a flat-screen TV is not something you're going to want to go through!
The tape also gave my clients a feel for how the furniture would take up the space of their family room — something they could not really feel from the floor plan.
Thanks to the painter's tape technique, I left their home able to rest easy that night. And now you can do the same before your next space-planning project.
Some rules of thumb for placing furniture:
More: Where to Put the TV?
11 Area Rug Rules and How to Break Them
How to Arrange Furniture in a Long, Narrow Space
Double checking your plan is always important. We did end up shifting the media center's position by about 6 inches. If I would have just gone off my drawing we would not have been as happy with the outcome. Rehanging a flat-screen TV is not something you're going to want to go through!
The tape also gave my clients a feel for how the furniture would take up the space of their family room — something they could not really feel from the floor plan.
Thanks to the painter's tape technique, I left their home able to rest easy that night. And now you can do the same before your next space-planning project.
Some rules of thumb for placing furniture:
- 3’ of space is recommended for traffic lanes. This can be more depending on the size of the family. If it’s a heavy traffic area, then wider is often better.
- Pull furniture away from the walls. Having all the furniture backs touching the walls is one of the biggest mistakes people make in the living room.
- Typical placement of a coffee table is 14 to 18 inches from the sofa.
- For television watching, the normal guideline is to place the television a distance of three times the size of the screen. But with some of these new big-screen TVs, three times the size of the screen is in the next room. Do a trial run before permanently installing your screen.
More: Where to Put the TV?
11 Area Rug Rules and How to Break Them
How to Arrange Furniture in a Long, Narrow Space
You can either create your space by sketching out your furnishings on graph paper or even try some free floor-planning software such as Homestyler or Floorplanner.