Everyone hates wasted space. The struggle to accommodate all of the rooms in your house with appropriate furniture is incredibly difficult. Unfortunately, many houses have rooms with strange proportions, especially with the advent of the “open-concept” floor plan.
How do you deal with furnishing an oddly shaped room? It can seem like an impossible task at times, with standard furniture sizes only furthering the issue. Fortunately, there are some options available to you if you’re dealing with arranging the decor for a room with a less-than-ideal shape. Take a look at the following options for furnishing your unusual room.
Making Alterations
One of the first options for furnishing your oddly shaped room is making alterations. This process is difficult, for sure, but makes use of items that you currently own or can afford on a budget, making it a better option for those who don’t want to go out and purchase specialty items or make drastic changes to their house and furnishings. There are several different options for altering your furniture, but they can all be used to take advantage of the items you currently own.
- Repurposing an item as something else: This is the least drastic step of all of the “alteration” techniques. Taking an item and using it for a novel purpose is an easy way to throw together some furniture, especially in areas where things don’t fit quite right. Some great examples of this are using trunks or vintage luggage as coffee tables or a repurposed ladder as a bookshelf.
Refinishing furniture: Refinishing furniture, especially chairs, can be a bit more complicated, but it gives new life and style to an older piece. This is especially useful if you have something that would work with the space but isn’t quite on theme with the rest of the style. A simple coat of paint, reupholstering, or similar adjustment can help it fit into the space much better.
Resizing furniture: This is the most complicated option available to you and can be difficult to accomplish if you are not experienced with power tools.
If you can find a piece of furniture that would still function appropriately in the space after having been shortened or adjusted, this may be a valid option.
Custom Furniture
Another option, especially if you have some extra cash on hand, is custom-built furniture. This can be very useful if you are staging a house for sale and have the resources of an agency behind you, as opposed to trying to furnish a house for yourself and your daily life. Custom furniture can be designed with the specific shape of the room in mind so that it fits snugly and perfectly.
Professionals can construct custom-built furniture to fit any space as needed. This takes more time and specialty, but these custom pieces can be beautiful anchors for the room at large. The larger the piece, the more expensive it will be, but the benefit is that it will be tailored to the exact room in which it is used, making it a perfect fit. Designing a custom piece of furniture for your room is a much more in-depth task than altering furniture yourself, but a professional will be doing the physical labor to make the dream become a reality. Also, while the price may seem like an issue, it need not be prohibitively expensive. Custom-designed furniture is becoming more common, and companies and solo builders are stepping up to the challenge for just such a time as this. Because of this, there is a wealth of options available for those seeking custom made furniture for an irregular room.
Break It Up
Perhaps the simplest option is to just break up the space into some more easily usable spaces. These design options can give you an idea of how to properly break up a large space to utilize it better. With the prevalence of open-concept floor plans, defining space is a common challenge for homeowners. This only really works if the space is sufficiently large, so there will be constraints on what you can do. However, if you are able to break things up into more common geometric shapes, such as rectangles and squares, you can organize things a lot better. It is much easier to place a couch, coffee table, and television in a regular, rectangular room, even if the delineation between rooms is merely visual.
Small cues like console tables placed behind a sofa, different rug patterns, or blocking off clear walkways to force traffic into a certain path are ways to define spaces that will make your rooms much more manageable. Also, consider utility when furnishing an oddly-shaped bedroom.
Don’t assume that these must all be separate ideas and concepts. You may be able to use your space most effectively with a few pieces of custom-built furniture while also blocking off the room to separate spaces. Or perhaps you’d prefer to reupholster some pieces you already own to save time and money, but you want to center them around one nicely built custom piece. All of these decorating options can be used in tandem. It may not work to force a space to work for you. Whether you’re living in or simply staging a house, these rooms must be decorated appropriately to maximize their appeal and use. If you’re selling, this could be the difference between getting an instant offer and having it sit on the market for months on end.
There are three great options here for you to make your space work for you. Recycling old pieces is always a great option because it saves time and money while also using pieces that may have sentimental or historical value. Custom-built pieces are guaranteed to fit and look amazing in your space while breaking up the space can help define the rooms enough to make your decor more functional and appealing. Whatever your choice is, don’t let an irregular room beat you. Take these steps and make it functional and enjoyable today.
Want more tips on room design? Read more tips here: How the Strategic Use of Windows Alters a Room’s Perception