Of course, you haven’t a clue where to begin.

It’s perfectly understandable. After all, there’s something undeniably intimidating about the empty expanse of a room with no furniture in it. But before you start pulling and pushing those heavy pieces of furniture from corner to corner, wall to wall, hoping to magically stumble upon that optimal configuration, sit down and make some plans. As anal-retentive as this might seem, trust me: it’s actually the lazy way out. You’ll be saving yourself a lot of physical exertion by waiting until you know exactly where everything’s going to go. We'll walk you through the basics of how to go about arranging  a room ...

Plan it out on paper
Get yourself some graph paper (or print out our handy-dandy pdf grid). Grab a tape measure and measure the dimensions of your room, then make a scale drawing on your graph paper. A convenient scale for a normal-sized room might be ½" on paper equals 1’ actual. Once you’ve got your room dimensions down, measure the positions of any fixtures that you’ll have to work around when arranging furniture – windows, fireplaces, radiators, doorways. Draw these fixtures on that floorplan sketch, labeling each object so you’ll remember what’s what. Make sure you leave enough room for any doors that have to swing open.

Next, measure every piece of furniture that you’re planning to put in the room. Using the same scale that you’ve chosen for your floorplan, cut out an appropriately-sized "footprint" for all of the furnishings. You can use colored construction paper if you’re feeling really fancy, using different colors to represent different types of furnishing. Or just use regular old paper, shaded in with pen or marker (so the shape stands out well against the graph paper floorplan). Again, make sure that you label each object.