Have you ever felt the blissful feeling of opening your eyes on a sunny morning and staring into a new space? Sometimes, our living spaces needs re-arrangement to give it a boost. When furniture placements stay the same for decades, our brains form habits around our stuff. Take these 8 tips to rearrange your living room and perk up your lifestyle.
How to enliven your living room
To bring new life into your space, you can decide to make big or small changes. Wherever you are at, consider these 8 suggestions to let your living area give you a better life:
When you jazz up your surroundings, you too will have a “waking up” sensation. This is your brain creating new pathways and most likely thanking you for giving it a new thought pattern to explore.
To help you spice up your living areas, follow these tips to make your living room more exciting.
Define a new focal point
Look at your living room and see what area draw your eyes immedietly. Now rearrange your living room in a way that creates a new focal point. You could move a bulky item from its old spot and re-define that focal point with a new furniture piece. Doing this can do wonders for your living room.
Our bookshelf was the main focal point when you entered our small apartment. When I moved the bookshelf from that wall to a different corner and replaced it with an awning table and chest for seating, it immediately made the place feel more open and bright. Why, you may ask? Because this book shelf covered this wall space that divides two windows. Now, the beautiful white is open and clean only covered by a short table and treasure chest. These smaller and lower furniture pieces made the perfect focal point between the two windows that surround it.
Move the furniture
When you decide it’s time to freshen up your living area, start with the furniture. Just like big things in life stand out in our mind, the big furniture in your house is also taking up a big space in your view.
But before you start shuffling things around, think about the area and how you may move it. When you have a rough idea of your new furniture layout, you can save time having to move stuff out of the way constantly while you are trying to find a suitable arrangement. In some cases this won’t be possible, like if you have a small living area where you will need to continuously move things from corner to corner as you try new set-ups.
Next, move little pieces (lamps, books, decor) to one corner of the room and clear off desks, side tables and book shelves. Don’t get discouraged by the mess, just keep moving along. The goal is to revamp the layout of the space, and for this you need to get to the foundation of your things: the furniture.
Divide the room
With your furniture bare and ready to move, now you can trial your new arrangement. Think about how you can liven up the room with a shift in the furniture, even if it feels awkward at first.
When you position your couch a few steps from the walk-in hallway, it may feel strange at first but once you move in the bookshelf beside it the two will compliment each other well. Experiment with a few positions before you decide on the the final arrangement.
What I usually do is move the furniture and stand back. Look around, reposition the pieces another way, and then stand in another spot. This may develop a new focal point and bring out a new area that previously looked bland. This brings me to my next tip: define a new focus point.
Pull your desk away from the wall
Now that many people are working from home, small living spaces now include a home office. It is very easy to put the desk against a wall and be done with it. But don’t do that. Rearrange your living room in a way that your desk does not face a wall, but rather the room or an open door. Looking past a computer screen at a wall is un-inspiring and can be a block for your thinking. When you think about it, what good can come from looking at a wall. Exactly.
Move your desk to look toward a door or out of a window. But don’t put your desk right by the window position it a few feet back to actually be able to look out when you glance past your screen.
Create new sitting places
In rearranging your living room, sometimes other furniture becomes new sitting places. For example, our treasure chest became the seating for our dining nook. My rigid office chair became a dual office and dining room chair.
This further led to the fascinating observation as I watched guests choose a seat when they enter our living room. I watched people move around more freely, which I really enjoy. Having options like a hard chair on one side of the dining book and a treasure chest on the other, which could also be an alternative to the couch, gave a variety of seating options from every angle of our space.
Eliminate”fake” light
Get rid of light that does not mimic natural light can be detrimental to your mood and health. Our eyes are used to and crave natural light. Bright white light does not occur naturally and can have a truly “manufactured” effect on the persons surrounded by it. Do more research, and when you are also convinced replace your bright lights with soft warm lights that mimic sunlight. Nothing sets the tone like a warm light on a dreary day.
Rearrange the wall art
When you rearrange your living room, take time to also rearrange the wall art. Over the years I have rotated picture frames, paintings, hats, textured cloths, etc.
When I stand in various areas around the living room and look at the other walls, I get a feel for where the wall and furniture would benefit from a decoration.
Declutter waste
It’s true, we all have far too much stuff. While this is a blessing in comparison to former years when people lacked much, all this stuff is beginning to make our houses ugly.
Get rid of stuff and go back to simple. It a waste, in any case, if it just sit around, un-used. Also, stop bringing in more stuff to sit around and make a waste in your rooms.
Change your point of view (pov)
Often, we get a new point of view when we rearrange a living room and move your furniture. When you create a new layout, you are forced to sit and look in a new direction. When I recently moved our living room around, my desk ended up in an angle it never was before. I looked up from my computer screen and saw 3 MOUNTAIN RANGES! Sure, we saw the mountains when standing here and there, but now I could see all 3 while I sat at my desk. Now that’s a good point of view.
Watch how we rearranged our living room
I created a YouTube video when we re-created our living space for Spring. Watch is here and let me know what you think of our former and new living room layout.
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