For a faster, more profitable home sale
When you declutter your living room of excess furniture, it will instantly feel more spacious and the positive features of the room will be revealed.
The living room is one of the most important rooms for most people. It's a room for entertaining family and friends and a place to put your feet up at the end of a long day.
Home buyers are looking for a living room that is spacious enough for their entertainment needs, as well as a relaxing retreat for their personal use.
Of all the rooms in the house, the living room demands the most attention when it comes to arranging furniture.
The living room is often the first room buyers see after coming through the door, so it's crucial that you impress them with your comfortable and practical furniture layout.
For help making small living rooms look more spacious, see small living room ideas.
What's wrong: In the picture above you see a television and table crammed into a corner, exposed wires, a cluster of unrelated items on the fireplace mantle, objects strewn across the coffee table and rumpled blankets and pillows left in a haphazard fashion.
The clock hanging over the fireplace is too high and out of scale with the fireplace, the coffee table is too high next to the sofas and the TV is awkwardly placed in a corner-- seems like an afterthought. The potted plant on the floor looks dead.
What to change: The sofa covers could be replaced with neutral colored slipcovers. The TV stand in the corner could be removed and the TV centered over the fireplace, but it is too small relative to the fireplace.
The clock above the fireplace could be replaced with a large piece of colorful artwork or a mirror at least 2/3 the width of the fireplace.
The fireplace mantle accessories could be arranged into organized vignettes with decorative objects. Avoid grouping tiny accessories, as they will look like clutter from a distance.
Pack away the patchwork quilt and accessorize with a textured throw in a pretty color and pillows in different shapes and odd numbers.
Add a coffee table close to the height of the sofa seats; side tables should be close to the height of the sofa arms. Sometimes a room will look off and you won't know why. It's often because the furniture is out of scale.
These days, the struggle to find the ideal placement for the big screen TV has created an extra challenge for home stagers and interior designers.
Cable wire connections are often situated in the wrong place and need to be moved. When decluttering your living room, be sure to situate all the TV wiring and attachments out of sight.
A big screen TV can also compete with a room’s natural focal point, requiring extra thought and creativity when placing your furniture.
Because the big screen TV is a good selling feature these days, you need to find the right place for it; whether as a focal point above a fireplace or console, or hidden out of sight in an armoire, on an entertainment unit or in a completely different room.
Before you place furniture back into the room, read about space planning for the home.
What is space planning? It's part of the home interior design process; understanding how balance, visual weight, traffic patterns, scale and axis effects the furniture layouts in your home.
Return from declutter your living room to declutter your home
Go to home page
Updated February 28, 2023