Mysest56 
September 5, 2018
Space planning is crucial to any good design. Your layout may look fantastic on paper, but furnishings which don’t match it can spell disaster for your own project.
Take this family-room design I am working , for example. The contractors were expected to arrive and hook up the flat-screen TV. I could have had them install it based off of my area plan alone, but I am the type who must feel my area to genuinely visualize it. We didn’t have all our furnishings however, so I used green painter’s tape to design my missing pieces. This enabled me to be more confident in my choice for the TV placement without the furniture being there.
Read on for a fast guide to using painter’s tape to plan out a furniture design and catch any mistakes before purchasing or installing permanent fixtures.
Once you’ve laid out your area on paper or the computer, you can start taking your furniture dimensions and taping off the regions they will occupy. I used this drawing of my own family-room job to place the area rug. If my rug hadn’t been obtained at that stage, I would have just taped off the rug as well.
You can create your space by pulling your furnishings on graph paper or perhaps attempt some free floor-planning applications such as Homestyler or even Floorplanner.
Once the area rug was set up, I placed the daybed. I began with that bit because I could only go so far with it until it would reach the fireplace hearth or the built-in cupboard.
Once I had the daybed decided, then I taped off a room for the sofa along the long wall.
Once the sofa was taped off, I discovered its centre and conducted a tape measure to the wall where the TV would sit. You may not want your sofa exactly based on all the TV, but in this situation I did.
Running the tape throughout the room let me find the place where the middle of this TV should be. Then I could also tape off the position to your credenza below it.
Once the TV and credenza placement was taped off, I introduced my customers back in the room to find out their comfortable TV-viewing height. So now, the TV contractors understood exactly where to hang the TV, and we can all feel assured that it was going to work together with our furniture design.
Double checking your plan is always significant. We did wind up altering the press center’s position by approximately 6 inches. If I would have just gone my drawing off would not have been as happy with the results. Rehanging a flat-screen TV isn’t something you are going to need to undergo!
The cassette also gave my customers a sense of the way the furniture would take up the area of their family room — something they couldn’t really feel in the ground plan.
Thanks to the painter’s tape technique, I left their house able to rest easy that night. And now you can do exactly the same prior to your next space-planning job.
Some rules of thumb for putting furniture:
3′ of space is suggested for traffic lanes. This can be more based on the size of their family. When it’s a heavy traffic area, then wider is frequently better.Pull furniture away from the walls. Having all of the furniture backs touching the walls is among the biggest mistakes people make in the dwelling room.Typical placement of a coffee table is 14 to 18 inches in the sofa. For television watching, the standard rule would be to place the television a distance of three times the size of this display. However, with some of those new big-screen TVs, three times the size of this display is in the next room. Do a trial run before permanently installing your display.
More: Where to Put the TV?
11 Area Rug Rules and How to Break Them
How to Organize Furniture in a Long, Narrow Space