Before buying living room furniture, room space planning often pays by helping you to avoid clutter. If there was one thing the Victorians were good at, it was clutter. They seemed to fill every inch of available space with furniture and accessories and forget that people needed space to walk in! Modern homes tend to be bright and airy, and while you don’t have to be exactly minimalist in your choice of living room furniture, you will not want to lose that sense of space by over-furnishing.
It is very easy to do this, particularly when you consider the wide range of living room furniture available today. Let’s have a brief look at the range of furniture you can use in your lounge.
Seating: Sofas, Chairs and Sectionals
There is a massive range of seating alternatives for your living room, whether you buy from a mall or an online furniture store. You can choose from sofas, armchairs, settles, rockers, sliders and recliners. Then you have a large selection of sectionals that you can arrange to suit your room layout.
It is not always easy to visualize how your selection of furniture would fit into your room, and that is once you have made your decision from all of these options. So how do you make that decision? How can you make it easier to visualize how your room would look when you have arranged your choice of living room furniture to your liking?
Cabinets: Display and Cocktail Cabinets and Chests
There is more to living room furniture than just the seating of course. You will also have some cabinets that you will use for display, holding drinks and glasses and also perhaps a bookcase, or secretaire.
These items tend to be set against the walls, while your seating tends to be located within the general room space. It can be difficult to visualize your choice of seating without having the cabinets to complicate matters.
Tables: Cocktail and Coffee Tables, End Tables and Accent Pieces
Tables are also essential pieces of living room furniture. Coffee and cocktail tables tend to be placed in from of sofas while end tables sit at either side of chairs or sofas. Accent pieces can be set against walls or in the general living space. It has now become all but impossible to visualize in your mind’s eye what your room will look like with all this furniture.
Will you be like the Victorians and fill your room with so much furniture that there is barely space enough to walk round it? You might see a sofa with matching armchairs you must have, and then fall in love with a gorgeous French chez longue. Then you might see a beautifully hand-made secretaire that would look fabulous in your lounge, and then…
Room Space Planning is the Answer
Room space planning makes it easier for you to see how your choice of furniture would fit into any room, not just your living room. This is one advantage that online furniture stores have over physical stores – particularly those that offer an online room planner. You can use the room planning facility to visualize how your room would look with the furniture you have chosen.
Not all furniture stores offer an online room planner, which is why those that do tend to be popular. By using a living room planner you can avoid becoming Victorian and retain your space and roominess while making sure that you purchase living room furniture that fits into the area you have available.
Many such services enable you to make a scale drawing of your floor space, and then add scale thumbnails of your choice of furniture. Others give you the floor diagram, into which you can sketch the furniture according to its provided dimensions. Whichever system you use, you will be able to see exactly how your sectional can be arranged to also accommodate your choice of sofa and armchairs.
Online Furniture Stores
Naturally, the best place to find online room space planning software is on the website of an online furniture store. Few such stores are exclusively online operations, but have a website to complement their physical store. The benefit of such stores is not just the room planner but also the fact that you can browse their stock from your own home.
You have no need to travel to your local shopping mall, and there are no apparent benefits in doing so other than being able to see the furniture in the flesh, so to speak. By shopping online you normally get to see a firm’s entire stock, which you certainly cannot do in a space-restricted mall store.
You also get to use the room space planning service, so that it is not left to chance or memory whether or not your choice of living room furniture would fit into your room. It is your choice whether you use an online furniture store or not, but the benefits gained by doing so appear to make it the best choice – particularly if you are purchasing more than one piece of furniture.