Make Sure Your Furniture Will Fit!

 

 

 

I ALMOST made another kinda big mistake.

 

Remember when I didn't even notice that there wasn't a hall closet in the plans for our new house?

 

Wellllll, I recently learned that 15 feet on paper seems WAY bigger than 15 feet in reality.

 

It's like when you're really hungry and you pile food on your plate thinking you could totally eat an entire grocery store and then you end up eating about half of what you piled on.

 

So, those 15 feet in your mind somehow stretch out to be somewhere around 30.
Our minds can seriously stretch reality.

 

So it's best to put reality on paper. 

 

If you don't have AutoCad at your disposal, or an assistant named Megan, who loves cranking out some floor plans on AutoCAD, you can easily put your space on paper...

 

 

 

Just get out some graph paper and a pencil, and steal some crayons from your kid.

My kid got a little upset with me because I used her NEW crayons. For SCHOOL.

I'm a bad mommy.......using the crayons I purchased and all.

 

Anyway, just set your own scale. Like one square equals 6" or 1 foot. Whatever is easiest. 

I find that most residential spaces will easily fit on one sheet of graph paper with the 1 square = 6" ratio.

 

Once I have the room all mapped out I go and measure the furniture that I know I want in the space or go shopping online for what I want in the future. Then, I can really see if the idea in my head is close to reality or a far fetched dream.

 

 

In my husbands case, his idea WAS NOT close to reality.

At least not for our future great room.

He got all hot and bothered over a 9 foot sofa at Restoration Hardware.
I laughed at him.
I tried to explain that it just wasn't going to fit but he didn't believe me until he saw it on paper. 
Once he realized how much it would cost to MAKE the 9 foot sofa fit he suddenly decided that a 7 foot sofa would do just fine.

 

REALITY.
 

It can be so cruel!

 

Another example of a stretched sense of reality was our Parlor Room.....

 

 

 

TOTALLY looks big enough, right?
Especially for a room that is hardly used.

 

Well, it was fine at 12 feet by 7 feet if we wanted to get ALL NEW FURNITURE!!

I don't think so.
 

 I am too in-love with my little white sofa for that to happen!

Plus, buying sofas is not particularly fun.

 

BUT buying fabulous pink chairs is VERY fun!

 

Back to my Parlor dilemma, I immediately informed our builder that the parlor had to grow by at least 18 inches.

 

Those 18 inches made a HUGE difference!

 

They meant having enough room for my little apartment sofa AND end tables.

 

 

 

 

End tables are important in my world.

Just for reference, that pencil line was where the room ended before we added the 18 inches.

The apartment sofa by itself was a tight squeeze. When you can't even fit an apartment sized sofa, it might be time to make a change.

 

The moral of the story.........don't assume your room dimensions will work just because the numbers seem reasonable.

 

If I hadn't made my little graph paper layouts, I would have discovered on move-in-day that I had a pretty white sofa problem in the parlor room.

 

 

 

Remember, it's not up to your builder to know whether or not your stuff will fit. His energy is better spent elsewhere.

 

It might sound ridiculous, but you should visually move into your house before the plans are even finalized. You will be way ahead of the game, saving yourself tons of stress and some serious dough!

 

Such dough could materialize as something awesome!

 

 

 

or something sleek and shiny!

 

 

WARNING: Your family might get annoyed with you having to document the measurements of every little thing AND your child might not appreciate you ruining the nice tips of his or her newly sharpened crayons. In your defense, you were trying to save money and stress and the results will be worth all the stubby crayons. 

 

 

 

I hope that if you are building a house at some point in your future that you can learn from me and my almost-big mistakes as well as my "OMG! what was I thinking?!?!?" mistakes.

What will I learn next???