Furniture Arranging Ideas – Furniture Arrangements to Suit You

Everybody, at some time or another, tries to move the furniture around to achieve a better result – they often fail abysmally and are never sure exactly why. Some rooms are notoriously difficult to place furniture so that it looks right, with many rooms either too long or narrow, or too small generally. Some even go to the other extreme and are so large the room feels cavernous no matter how much furniture you fill it with. I live in a tiny ex-miner's cottage and, although the frontage of my house is small, the house goes back a long way and is bigger inside than it looks from the outside. The rooms, however, are small – apart from my bedroom which runs the whole width of the house, but is about a foot too narrow to be able to put my bed in more than one position along one wall.

Furniture arranging ideas are always going to be constrained by the size of your rooms and that will not change. It is something you will always have to work with. To get optimum use from any room you need to arrange your furniture so that the space you have is used most efficiently. However, you also need to ensure that, whatever the placement, your furniture is still shown off to its maximum impact. In some rooms that is a pretty tall order!

Before you start the back-breaking task of moving furniture around, regardless of which room you are re-organizing, you need to decide where your focal point is going to be. To get the best effect your furniture needs to be arranged opposite the focal point. These days, many homes treat the television as the focal point. It could be a particular window looking out onto a dramatic vista, or a fireplace.

Ideally, chairs should be set in a group about eight feet from each other – in my house, chance would be a good thing! My living room is simply too small to put anything more than a settee and one chair! The ideal is to have a table near to each chair – well, in my house, I have a small coffee table which can be reached from all seating positions. The point I am making here is that, although there are furniture arranging 'rules' you do not have to stick to them slavishly.

Take a look at the furniture arranging 'rules' and then adapt them according to your own circumstances. One of the most important aspects of arranging furniture is to ensure there is appropriate lighting. It is all very well having a centralised ceiling light, but this will not provide adequate lighting throughout the room. A couple of standard lamps and two or three table lamps help to provide sufficient lighting.