Figuring out your furniture footprint
By Christa TerryA while back, I talked about using tools to help you plot out a room’s worth of furniture. Software is just one option. There’s always your handy dandy graph paper. I even knew one guy who’d cut out little pictures of couches and end tables and move them around the miniature room he’d sketched out.
But here’s an option I never realized existed…
Yep, that’s right. It’s pre-fab flat paper “furniture” that lets you guesstimate the footprint of your stuff and then move it around until you find a configuration you like. Move it without giving yourself a hernia, I mean. Back when I was in high school I would move my bedroom suite around every few months, never taking the drawers out of anything or the mattress off the bed. I’d shove, shove, shove until I’d gotten everything just right, probably ruining the carpeting in the process. Sorry, mom!
At about $30 a room, the sets are fairly cheap, which is good considering that they’re basically heavy duty paper. You could go to your local arts and crafts emporium, get a bunch of off-the-roll paper, and DIY, but art supplies tend to be pretty expensive and you may end up spending just as much. The upside of sourcing your own paper is that you can cut it to match your actual furniture instead of having to rely on someone else’s standards.
February 13th, 2008 at 7:18 am
My husband and I did this using brown craft paper from a huge roll. It was a great way to see just how big some of the furniture was.
February 13th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Mr. Henry’s friend Eliza runs a company dedicated to exactly this, but she creates three-dimensional images of your room with furniture in different arrangements. Take a look at http://www.fittingbydesign.com/home.html