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Need help arranging furniture in living room?

I am planning to buy new furniture for our living room and need help with ideas for furniture to buy and how to position it. It's a large, rectangular room that's our only family/living room - most of the time we use it for watching TV, playing with the kids, etc. but it's also where we entertain guests, so it needs to be presentable. Here's the layout: in the middle of one long wall, there's a fireplace, which is lovely, and should probably be the focal point of any sofa set-up. On one short wall we have a flat-screen TV mounted, and on the opposite short wall there's a huge picture window that faces on to the street. On each long wall there are a pair of windows, which makes it a little hard to position furniture against the wall. You enter the room from the corner adjoining the wall with the TV and the wall opposite the fireplace. We're replacing old furniture and starting from square one, except for an antique Persian rug that covers about two-thirds the floor. Any ideas?

Public Comments

1. Why don't you make a small scale model with a cardboard box? Take off the top (ceiling), and voila. You can cut out the windows in the sides, and the doors. Then make some small, simple cardboard models of your furniture, and place it around. It willl be much easier to move than the real thing! If you are clever and careful, you could cut up the sides of the corners, so that you can fold a wall down and get more than a bird's eye view. To hold the wall together again at the top, a small piece of duct tape will do. I am sure the local library will have a number of books on the idea. Remember, you are making a model, not a diorama. Also, the colors should be close, but need not be exact.
2. Use one side of the long wall upto window sill hight, i.e low cabinet with usable top. You can have a cut out for a chair to use the top as a desk.
3. have you considered mounting the TV over the fireplace mantle? that way both the TV and the fireplace can serve as the focal point. A large ottoman that can do double duty as a coffee table and extra seating would be a good choice (theres also storage for toys inside). shelving units with covered storage areas at the bottom (so the kids can get at it) on either side of the fireplace taking up almost the entire length of the wall would be great for hiding toys and games and clutter when you want to use the space to entertain adults.these can be arranged or built to fit around the windows. doors that flip down from the shelving units can serve as desks/work areas for the kids to color or play games, then just fold up neatly hiding everything. make sure one of the cupboards is big enuff to hold a few kid size stacking chairs/stools. great for entertaing is a wheeled bar cart that can be loaded up in the kitchen and then wheeled into the living area to serve as a buffet, freeing up coffee table space. in a space like yours, you could place 2 sofas against the wall across from the fireplace. place a large side table between them then slightly angle out the opposite sides from the wall so that they form a shallow V . this gives you plenty of seating across from the fireplace and/or TV and pulls the sofas slightly away from the windows on that wall. You could place large floor standing plants in the triangular areas between the backs of the sofas and the windows.l
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