Arranging living room furniture in a right way decides whether your living room looks cluttered and overstuffed or an organized comfortable room where you like to spend most of your time. We will learn how to make a living room furniture layout and see how living room furniture placement can help us in making our lives easier. The first step to plan how to put the furniture in the living room is to measure up the room and draw a sketch of the room on a graph paper using a scale such as ¼ in to 1 ft. Note down where and how many windows and doors are situated in the living room, their size, the height of the windowsills and the space between the windows and the doors.

Be sure to mark the location of the electrical points and outlets, telephone point, cable and light switches in the living room to help you know what goes where. You can also use small-scale furniture paper cutouts to see your living room will look after arranging the furniture. Choose a focal point of the living room and arrange your furniture and lighting around it. Some of the popular focal point ideas in a living room are a fireplace, a view from the window, window opening out in a garden, a large bookcase, sofa with a special painting hung above it, a home theater system or big size plasma television.

You may also turn one of the corners of the living room in a focal point using an interesting lamp, tabletop waterfall or other unique decorative pieces on it along with the lighting to highlight it. Set up conversation areas for your guests. There should 4 to 10 ft of distance between your sofa or loveseat and chairs, so that people can talk to each other easily. Less than 4 feet of distance will make your living room too cramped, while more than 10 feet of distance between sofa and the chairs will make conversation difficult. Legroom between the sofa, loveseat or chairs and the coffee table should be at least 14 to 18 inches.

Try to make pathway to walk freely in the living room without stumbling on the furniture that is at least 2 to 3 feet wide. Furniture placement and layout in a small living room can be quite challenging. In a typical apartment living room with space restraints, we will usually find that the entertainment center is the biggest piece of furniture and has to be placed at the right position first. Rest of the furniture is set around it. The sofa goes directly opposite to the TV and you may place the chair at an angle. It can be turned around to watch TV or talk to the person sitting on the sofa at your convenience. Two chairs on either side of the sofa will give a balanced look to the room.

In a small living room, the height and mass of the furniture should be too contrasting. A low table against a high back chair can be visually balanced by adding a tall piece of art above it. Do not use bulky cabinets and sleek metallic chairs together. Maintain visual harmony and thematic balance in your living room decor. Keep the number of the pieces of furniture down to avoid cramped look in a small living room. Use two love seats facing each other instead of four chairs or one sofa and two chairs instead of one loveseat and three or more chairs. Tall living rooms can be subtly divided into separate conversation and work areas by using a sofa or other big piece of furniture that does not need support of a wall to divide up the room.