In the past, living room or the parlor was the place with formal settings to welcome the honored guests. With times, it has evolved into a multifunctional room meant to welcome guests, sit and relax comfortably while reading a good book or watching TV, spend some time with the family, chat and gossip with friends and for entertainment. The most common furniture pieces found in the living room are sofas, love seat, sofa with chairs in different combinations, coffee table, end tables, ottomans, benches, shelves and perhaps a desk and bookshelves. If the living space is also used as a family room, you can also find TV and entertainment center in the room along with accessories, lighting, art and crafts on display and may be carpets.

An extra large living room may accommodate a piano, eating area complete with dining table, tennis or billiard table or even a number of plants, if your living space receives lots of direct sunlight. You may also shift am armoire to make use of the extra space for storage purposes. Living room can use maximum number of furnishings and it is a challenge to fit in all the desirable furnishings and accessories and coordinate them with carpeting, wall color, crown moldings, lighting style and window treatments among many other things. Usually, sofa or the entertainment center is the largest piece of furniture in a living room and since, placement of sofa will decide the view and focal point for the people seated in the living, room, use it as the starting point for living room decor.

Express your personality, your personal taste and decorating flair in the way you decorate your living room. Remodeling or decorating your living room doesn't just mean to throw away items and add furniture pieces to the living room but how you arrange what you already have in the room. Arrangement mistakes can ruin the look of your room. Do not go wild with imagination. Some of the rules and traditional ways of keeping things and proper design must be followed to keep things sane. Creative and unusual living room decorating ideas should be limited by the comfort and usability of the room to make the living room more inviting.

Designing in innovative ways that 'break the rules' can be tricky, so is best left to professionals. Ensure that you maintain visual balance and harmony while displaying your accessories and should not look chaotic. For budget decorating, try to use what you already and then only opt to buy new things that you think are absolutely necessary. See, if rearranging furniture and accessories can achieve the effect you want. For a dream living room, it is not necessary to start from scratch. Make sure that you do not let your precious collection of art lie wasted or ignored just because you didn't think of placing them correctly.

While decorating a living room, one must pay attention to the natural focal point of the room, lifestyle of the family members, functional placement of furniture, creating well-defined traffic patterns, creating close grouping and intimate conversational areas, visual balance, ambient lighting, color scheme of the room and fabric patterns of the curtains, window treatments and the upholstery. You must also watch out for organizing things, display of accessories, camouflaging architectural elements that are ugly, hanging art and wall groupings, proportion and scale of decoration, unifying factor of your decoration and most importantly, when to stop.