Days of endless wind and rain make us all a little crazy this time of year. When I start to feel that restless itch, I know exactly what to do –use cooped up weekend days to rearrange things.
When I was a girl, my friends and I loved rearranging our rooms. Together, we saw possibilities we couldn’t envision on our own. This yielded creative, fresh arrangements of furniture, stuffed animals, and posters. It was my first time to experience a bed that was placed kitty-corner in a corner, for example, rather than along a wall.
Rearranging a bedroom was fine for that era of my life, but these days, I love rearranging a home. By looking all of your furnishings from a different perspective, your session will be more thorough and will result in more creative layouts and arrangements.
Tips For Rearranging the Furnishings in Your Home
Here are some of my tips for rearranging the furnishings in your home. In many cases, you’ll feel you’ve benefitted from a mini-remodel since things will look and feel so different. And, the best part about it – you don’t have to spend a single dime.
Tackle the de-cluttering projects first
First, it’s wise to get serious about de-cluttering. If you have accumulated “stuff” throughout your home, it will stymie your rearranging process. Piles here and piles there need to be dealt with before certain furniture pieces can be moved.
Believe me, when I say, this will take the wind right out of your sails. Come Monday, you’ll be sitting around with a bunch of furniture slid this way and that, piles of junk laying around – and no time to do anything about it. Instead, take the weekend before your rearranging project to eliminate the clutter. Read, A Guide to What Stays and What Goes, to help you sort through things.
Get out the extra paint cans
Once you start moving furniture and art, you’ll notice the walls are a bit dingier, dinged up, scuffed or faded than you realized. By having your extra paint cans and brushes at the ready, you’ll be able to do touch-up work in the moment, rather than having to scramble to find what you need.
If you’re thinking about re-painting, this is an optimal time to do it. Once the sun returns, you’ll want to head outside and latent paint projects will languish for another year. Hit the paint stores and start dreaming –using the time you have with furniture pulled away from the walls to slap on the paint or wallpaper you’ve been dreaming about.
Enlist the help of a savvy design friend
We all have them. Those friends with a great eye, always able to make something out of nothing. While your attempts at thrift-store shabby-chic wound up looking just-plain-shabby, theirs could grace the cover of Country Living.
This is the friend you want to have over for tea or lunch while you discuss your plans. His or her eyes will light up and the energy will begin to crackle with excitement. Ah, yes! The possibilities will now be revealed to you.
Don’t get locked into individual rooms
Obviously, beds and significant dressers are going to remain in the bedrooms, but don’t get stuck on a particular room’s furniture or items as having to remain in that room. Instead, try to see your home as a blank canvas and act as if all of your furnishings were sitting out on the front lawn in a big heap. These furnishings are your oyster and your mission is to re-think them – and your living space – in a new light.
So, that desk in the guest room may be the perfect new TV stand for the living room – or perhaps it would work in a corner as a display space for your indoor terrarium. The wood TV tray you keep tucked in a closet might become the perfect corner bar in your formal living room. Perhaps it’s time to find a new way to orient couches and chairs, swapping the wingback in the master bedroom for a chaise lounge you used in the living room.
Don’t be afraid to unload things
Sometimes, we cart things around with us for the simple reason that they’re ours. But they might not really work in our lives. We once had a very attractive and even comfortable loveseat in our family room. The problem was, nobody ever really sat on it. Finally, we realized, “this room would have a whole lot more space if we simply got rid of that!”
So we did, and we moved a lower-profile chair from the guest room in its place. We wound up with two rooms – the family room and the living room – that felt more spacious and we ended up cash positive to boot from the money we got for the loveseat.
Create your own gallery or collection wall
Once you begin rearranging, you may find you have enough miscellaneous art tucked away – or formerly on display around the house – that you can create a beautiful gallery wall. This will come in handy if you wind up with more blank wall space than you used to have when Furniture A moves from here to there. Similarly, your new arrangement might allow you the chance to display your collections in a way that does them justice – pulling them out of hidden corners and into the forefront.
Are you inspired or what? Rearranging your home is a wonderful way to embrace a new year and whole new outlook.