Decorating A Small Living Room – Be Cramped No More

Decorating A Small Living Room – Be Cramped No More
Every house has it shares of unique qualities and difficult areas in terms of interior decorating and design styles.  Most likely if you are a home owner or even a renter you have found yourself frustrated at times and not sure what direction to go with your home decorating.  One of the most complicated problems that many of us suffer from is a small living room.  If you are trying to decorate a small living room you can really run into a ton of problems and it can be a difficult task.  However, the steps in this article should help you seek some relief form the cramped spaces of a poorly designed small living room.

Think First Use Second
You will want to start first by planning how much space you have in your living room.  Actually get the tape measure out and measure the space you have.  Consider if there are any changes you can make to expand the space easily.  Once you know how much space you have to work with you need to sit down and carefully plan what sort of activities you will be doing in your living room.  For many the living room is mainly for watching TV and maybe having a conversation with family.  However, others do crafts, homework, computer time and all kinds of other things in their living room.  Carefully plan out what tasks you will be doing and see if some of the tasks that are currently done in the living room can’t be relocated elsewhere in the house.  This will help maximize the space you have and ensure you are using it for what you really want to be doing.

Multi Functional
The second thing is as you are out shopping and even in the planning stages always force yourself to think multi functional.  You should never buy a piece of furniture or even any decoration that can not be used in two or three ways.  A coffee table with now storage space is pretty useless and everything will end up on top of it creating most clutter and making the room feel smaller.  Instead take your time and carefully consider the variety of ways you can use each piece of furniture you put into the room.

Right Size
Always make sure that you get the right sized pieces of furniture. All too often people get stuck buying a large couch or other piece of furniture that was designed for a much bigger space.  Do you really need a three sealer or can you find a small version that will work just as well.  As much as you can carefully track what your purchase and make sure it is pared down to what you really need.

Pair Down and Store
Again as you go about decorating your room always look for ways that you can pair things down and store items away.  Maybe you can store items in the ottoman or coffee table or under some of the extra storage space under the TV table.  Recently we went through all of the DVD’s and VCR tapes in our house and simplified this all by taking them out of the dvd case and putting the DVD disc in a folder meant to hold CD’s.  We were able to take out two whole media shelving units and replace it with a binder full of dvds which fits right under the tv easily.

By carefully selecting your furniture and making sure it is both the right size and multipurpose you can really expand the amount of space you have in your living room.