A Bakers Dozen of Tips

1.Just because you have a wall doesn’t mean the furniture must be smooshed up against it. It’s all about usage and traffic flow.

2. If your room is tiny, pull the furniture out from the wall two inches. The walls will appear further away and the room will be perceived as larger.

3. Choose the correct sized TV for your room.  Multiply the size of your TV by 3 for the maximum viewing distance, multiply it by 1.5 for the minimum distance. For example, a 48-inch TV multiplied by 3 = 144 inches or 12 feet for maximum viewing distance, 48 times 1.5 divided by 12 = 6 feet for minimum distance.

4. To decide how big the screen should be, divide the distance from the sofa by 1.5 for the maximum size, divide it by 3 for the minimum size. For example, if your sofa is 6 feet from the TV, 6 divided by 3 is 2, or 24 inches for the minimum sized TV. 6 feet divided by 1.5 equals 48 inches for the maximum sized T.V.

5. If you want to talk to someone on the far side of the conversation area, nine feet is the maximum distance between people to clearly carry on a conversation.

6. Grommet panels are meant to be hung covering about 24 inches of rod and are not meant to be opened and closed. No skimping.

7. Get an area rug with the colors of your room in it and choose ONE of those colors as your accent color. Most rooms in the modern aesthetic have one or two colors in their color schemes. three-color schemes can date a room.

8. Make sure your area rug sits under the feet of all the furniture around it.

9. Don’t spread your family pictures out over lots of surfaces. Get them into a group and hang them together on a hall wall.  Pictures all over the place make a room busy. Pictures all together on one wall make a collection. Don’t put tiny pictures where no one can get close enough to see them.

10. A decoration above an item such as a sofa or hall table should never be wider than the item itself.

11. Individual items in collections, such as on a mantle, should be large enough to be identifiable from the normal viewing distance. Larger and less..

12. The bottom edge of the shade on light fixtures beside a bed or sofa should be at eye level when you are sitting in the bed leaned against the headboard and reading, or sitting on the sofa. If your lamp is too short but a basket or a stack of books under it until you can get new fixtures.