How to Arrange Furniture on Paper

Have you every wanted to rearrange you furniture, but were afraid to waste all that time moving your furniture to hate the arrangement or have things not fit right?  Here is my simple and inexpensive solution:  arrange your furniture on graph paper.  All you need is graph paper, pencil/pen, and a tape measure.Measure you room and graph it onto the paper, on my example 2 squares equal one foot.  Don’t forget to mark the windows and doors.  I also like to mark electrical outlet, cable outlets and phone jacks.

Now you’ll need to measure and graph your furniture using the same scale as you room drawing, for this example: 2 squares equals one foot.  Cut that furniture out and start arranging! 

I have got a bit of a problem, my furniture is to big for my space.  New furniture is not in the budget and I have to get this stuff to fit.  I have three different options:

Option 1 – Sofa floating in the middle of living room and not really room for end tables.

  Option 2 – Flipping living room and dining room.  There are no outlets or cable outlets where I have put the entertainment center and I would have to run cords!  Living room is basically just leftover furniture storage.

Option 3 – Entertainment center blocks half of French doors and one built in, plus cords would have to be run as there are, once again, no outlets.

The long term solution is to move the entertainment center and sofa to the basement, where we are planning to have a family room and buy new, smaller furniture for upstairs.  I am not ready to do that yet and I would like to have our TV on the main floor for now, what do you think would be the best way to arrange everything?  I don’t have to use all of the furniture, but we need to have places to sit.