Decorating With Kids: Furniture Layouts

I have a fun exercise to share with you today. A great way to get your kids interested in decorating is to make it fun. So, today I have a little game or a puzzle of sorts to do with your kids.

In this fourth post in the Decorating With Kids series we are going to talk about furniture layout and how to rearrange furniture. The good part is you don’t have to actually move any furniture. Instead we are going to do it on paper.

Just like with all the Decorating With Kids topics, the most important thing is to get your children involved.  Letting your children know they are important and how they feel about their home is important, builds trust and their interest in decorating.  But don’t just take it from me.  Jen, from I Heart Organizing, and Sherry, from Young House Love, share similar thoughts about including their kids and just how simple it can be.

Of course I don’t ask my kiddos about every single decorating decision I make around most of our home, but I do ask them about colors and opinions on the larger things that really make our house a home {they helped pick out our living room sofa!}.  It is also about selecting things that are easy for them to live with.  Soft sided ottomans, kid friendly fabrics and a place for them to store their belongings in each room.  I want my kids to feel at home no matter what space they are in, and always keep that rule number one in my mind when selecting anything for our abode.

I think remembering that everyone who lives in the house should be represented (and should feel right at home) is important. Clara seems especially excited when I do the simplest things, like ask her what she thinks. So if I’m hanging something up in the living room and can’t decided on the placement, I might say “hmm, do you like it here or here, Clara?” – she just likes to be involved and gets the biggest proudest smile when we hang the picture and step back to admire it.

I have wanted to rearrange the furniture in my son’s room for a long time. We settled on the current arrangement the day we moved in and it has bothered me ever since. The flow in the room is horrible. I cringe every time I see my son walk over his bed to get to the bathroom. He could walk around the bed, but has decided going over the bed is easier. We also want to add a desk to his room. There isn’t space for one with the current layout.

To help decide on a new layout I did a little exercise with my son. First, I had him help me measure his room and all the furniture in it. We drew a rough sketch of the room (not to scale) to write our measurements on.

There are three roles your kids can play, depending on their age and interest:

1. Holding one end of the tape measure – great for younger kids, as long as they can hold it in place long enough for you to get the measurement
2. Reading the measurement – great for kids practicing their numbers, let them read off the number on the tape measure
3. Writing down the measurements – just show them which wall to write the number by and double-check they wrote it correctly

Once we had all the measurements, I drew the room to scale on another piece of graph paper. You can use a computer program like Floorplanner.com or Google Sketch Up to do this, but if you have never used one before you might spend as much time figuring out how to draw the first wall as you would just drawing the room by hand. Drawing the room on paper is just easier in my opinion.  We used graph paper with a 1/4″ grid (4 squares = 1″).  We chose to have 2 squares, or 1/2″, equal 1 ft. on our scale drawing.

We made sure to also measure all the doors and windows and place them correctly on the drawing. These are important when deciding on a room layout. Be sure to draw in the door and which way it swings open. For example, my sons bedroom door opens into his room, but his closet door opens the other way into the closet. The door to the bathroom is a pocket sliding door.

I also drew scale representations of all the furniture pieces we planned to keep in the room, along with the new desk and chair we wanted to add to the room. I cut out each of the furniture shapes.

I sat my son down in front of the scale drawing of his room. Since he helped measure and draw it, he understood the layout. I used the furniture cutouts to show him how his room was arranged now. I gave him the extra desk and chair piece. I told him he could rearrange the furniture however he wanted to fit in the desk.

As he played around with the furniture pieces, I reminded him of a few layout ground rules:

• You can’t block doorways
• You can’t put tall things in front of a window
• The back of the dresser should be against the wall
• The headboard of the bed should be against a wall (Note: Some people feel strongly against putting any bed larger than a twin up against the wall.  My son has a queen-sized and to get the best flow and most floor space possible, I was open to allowing him to put the bed up against wall.)
• It is important to have good flow through the room

If he broke one of the ground rules, we’d talk about it. For example, when he put his bed this way, I pointed out that it blocked the closet door.

When he put the desk in the corner by the bathroom door, I pointed out how the chair might affect the flow by blocking the bathroom door.

After a few reminders he had the ground rules down and he finalized his furniture layout. He was so excited about it, he ran off to get a glue stick to glue all the furniture in their new places :)

Of course, there will always be curve balls thrown your way when working with kids.  I tried to limit my son to focus just on the furniture pieces I gave him.  He objected considerably to me leaving out his chalk board easel and a toy chest that is empty in his room.  I decided those could be better used elsewhere.  And, when the requests get really crazy, just follow Dana’s example, from House*Tweaking,  and do your best to appease them.

Layne asked for a secret door leading to a hideout. Everett asked for an upstairs. (We live in a single story home.) I hung floor-to-ceiling curtains around their bunk. It feels like a hideout and, well, the upper bunk is as close as we’re going to get to a second story in this house.

This week we will be rearranging the furniture in his room according to his plan. I can’t wait to see how it looks. I welcome any layout that doesn’t lead him to walk over the bed to get to the bathroom :).  This is the new layout:

We are planning to do this exercise next on Jax’s nursery. At well over 3 years old I think it is time we figure out a new arrangement to get rid of the toddler bed and put in a big boy bed.

You can catch up on all the Decorating With Kids posts right here.