A Floor Plan

Number one on the list of things to do if you are considering a room make-over, a renovation or especially if you are building is a floor plan of each room.

Here are a few of the ways a floor plan will help you:

It will tell you the size of the furniture you should have in the room. Have you ever heard about the new sofa being delivered and not fitting into the room? A floor plan would have foreseen this.

Working with a room usage list, it will tell you where to place lighting in the room.

It will tell you the size and shape of the coffee table, area rug and dining table.

It will show you how people will move through the room, and will prevent traffic flow problems.

It will help you plan seating for the maximum number of people you foresee having in the room.

It will tell you how big the armoire to house the T.V. should be and what size that T.V. should be. Yes it will.

It will tell you how big the bed can be and what size the bedside tables should be.

It will tell you how to make the living room conducive to conversations.

It will show you if the room is ‘balanced’ or not. - We have all been in rooms where the majority of the furniture is on one side of the room, giving the room a feeling of more weight on one side than the other. It feels off center.

It will save you money because you won’t be buying anything not on the plan.

It takes a bit of time to put one together, but, like a business plan, once you have done it you will wonder how you managed without it. When you go shopping for a piece of furniture, you will know how big it should be, think of the time you will save if you can say to the furniture salesman ’ My sofa should be 80 inches long, don’t show me anything other than that, please’. It will save you money; no more impulse buying. We have all bought something, thinking ‘Oh -I’ll make it work’ only to find it is too small, too tall, too wide, and the piece ends up in the basement.

In the next column, I’ll explain how to do a floor plan to scale.