Set Up a Small Living Room

Making the most of every inch of space in a small living room can be a challenge. Placing furniture, choosing the right colors, window treatments and accessories to make a cozy space live large takes time and planning. When you are working with limited square footage, choose scaled-down furniture and multiuse pieces, make the most of your vertical space and fool the eye into thinking the room is larger than it is.

Draw a floor plan of the space. Measure the room and use graph paper so that you can draw it approximately to scale, or simply make a rough drawing. Sketch in your larger pieces of furniture like the couch and chairs. Draw more than one floor plan and consider different furniture configurations.

Paint your walls in light colors or neutrals. Keep the ceiling, moldings and trim white. Install crown molding to draw the eye up and make the ceiling look higher than it is. Reflect natural light by installing mirrors on a wall opposite a window.

Buy furniture that is in scale with the room, such as a love seat or easy chairs rather than a full-size sofa. Choose pieces that are multifunctional like storage cubes and ottomans that can act as extra seating. Forgo a large coffee table in favor of two ottomans or storage cubes situated in front of the couch. Or choose one with a glass top.

Slipcover furniture that is upholstered with large, busy prints. Stick to neutral fabrics with no designs and accessorize with throw pillows. Cover all upholstered furniture with the same fabric.

Arrange the furniture to take advantage of a focal point like a fireplace, large window, grouping of pictures or entertainment center. Anchor it with a large area rug. Create a conversation area by placing two loveseats opposite each other or two chairs opposite a love seat.

Hang curtains above your windows and make them floor length to make the room seem taller. Choose lightweight fabrics that filter natural light rather than heavy materials that block it.

Install your television on the wall rather than housing it in a cabinet that will take up valuable floor space.

Organize your living room. Tuck clutter into storage cubes. Hang shelves on the wall to corral books and knickknacks.

Accessorize your living room sparingly. Highlight the room with a few well chosen pieces of art. Pare down collections and display only a few pieces.

Choose Art for Your Living Room

A living room is a public space - and as its name implies, it's an important room. Here's how to choose and display art that showcases your interests and makes your guests feel comfortable.

Identify the spaces you want to fill. Art should be more or less in scale with the space it hangs in, which means you'll want large pieces for large spaces (over the mantle, if you have one) and smaller pieces for smaller spaces (between the twin windows, for example).

Decide on a color scheme if you haven't already.

Decide on a mood or identify the one you've already created for the room. Is your living room a formal Victorian parlor? Or an informal space with beach mats and beanbag chairs on the floor for kids to sprawl around on?

Look for pieces that complement your theme. For a living room, it's best to avoid anything too controversial - landscapes and black-and-white photographs are fine, but erotica and dead animals are out, unless you really want to make a statement (or put some things away when your mother-in-law comes over).

Consider incorporating several themes or categories - hang them wall by wall. You might, for example, have one wall with vintage sepia-toned photos and another with small desert landscapes.

Frame the pieces well if they're paper, using archival-quality mats and sealing the backs. It's a good idea to match frames, especially for similar categories - for example, cream mats with narrow black wood frames for all the black-and-white photographs; double mats and gold leaf frames for your set of Italian lithographs.

Make it a point to check your pieces once in a while. Light changes during the year, so something that's fine in December may find itself in direct sun come June - and a piece that's fine one year may take on moisture damage the next year if the backing comes loose.

Placing Furniture in a Small Living Room

Arranging your furniture in a small living room can present a challenge. How you place the furniture can determine whether the room looks inviting or crowded and cluttered. There are design elements that can give your room a feeling of airiness. Optimizing traffic flow and ridding the room of clutter are important factors. Proper use of lighting can enlarge a room visually. Your color scheme is critical. By taking these elements into consideration, you can have a living room that has style and appears to be more spacious.

Determine the focal point of your room. You might choose the entertainment center, a piece of furniture or a fireplace. Place your chosen piece at one end of the room. Arrange the rest of your furniture to complement the focal point.

Arrange a conversation area opposite your focal point. It could be a sofa or two smaller chairs with a table between them. Pull the chairs out from the walls at a slight angle facing each other. If you line all your furniture up against the walls, the room takes on a boxy look that emphasizes its small size. Further define your conversation area by putting an area rug under or in front of your sofa or chairs. Keep the colors in the area rug soft so it does not divide the room. Place your other chairs or sofa so they complement this arrangement. Ideally you should be able to seat six people.

Lighting is especially important in a small living room because it gives the illusion of space. Have at least three sources of lighting such as table lamps, floor lamps, overhead lighting and windows. Use mirrors to reflect the light and give the illusion of more space. Hang one or two mirrors on a wall opposite a light source to make a room feel larger.

Create good traffic flow. It is important that your guests be able to move easily through the room. Get rid of excess clutter, excess furniture or furniture that is too large for the room.

Choose a palette of softer neutral colors for the walls, window treatments and major pieces of furniture. This gives the room a feeling of spaciousness and airiness. Add patterns and brighter colors with pillows and smaller accessories.

Decorate the Living Room Cheaply

The living room is as comfortable as an old shoe -- and just as shabby. Don't settle for "make do" just because the budget doesn't say "makeover." Reinvent your dated salon with clever swipes of color, surprising curated collections, a few new traffic patterns and a change of upholstery fabric that looks more ambitious than it actually is.

Camouflage With Color
Pick up your paintbrush for a cheap, fast transformation. Painting an accent wall instantly changes a room, and the new jolt of color will inspire you to tweak other elements into a new configuration. Pull a color from a favorite rug or artwork -- the turquoise from a colorful zigzag of glaze on a Native American pot is dramatic on the wall and a vivid backdrop for your Southwestern art finds. Raise the energy with a complement to the main room color -- the washed-out-blue walls will come alive when one of them is covered in burnt orange. Once you've painted the accent wall, turn it into a gallery with inexpensive frames -- all the same style and color -- to display a collection of black-and-white photographs or matted artwork.

Style Your Coffee Table
Something as simple as arranging what goes on the coffee table can make a dramatic difference in your living room's appearance. Park a pretty silvered mirrored tray on the table and set it with a tableau of a silver candlestick, crystal vase with a single blossom, glass snow globe, and a lump of rose quartz or a found bird's nest. "Knoll" your coffee table for an arresting organization of things deliberately placed. Knolling is a technique of arranging similar objects parallel to the edges of the table, or in 90-degree angles: magazines stacked precisely two inches from one corner; a paperweight collection arranged in a square at the opposite corner; several figurines from your travels along one table edge; your collection of opera glasses in the center. As long as the objects are evenly spaced and grouped by similarity, their placement becomes a geometric work of art.

Elevate the Mundane
You don't have to invest in new furniture for a new look in the living room. "Shop" your attic, cupboards and closets for interesting items to enliven the space. Line up several pairs of worn, hand-tooled cowboy boots along the sofa table. Hang the vintage garden tools, inherited from a former owner of the house, over the sofa. Paint an old chest and deputize it as your new coffee table. Replace the dining room rug with a sisal mat and move the rug to the living room conversation area. Sew tabs at the tops of canvas dropcloths and use them as drapes. Decoupage old paper maps to the inside back panels of your bookcases. Fill the empty firebox of the decorative fireplace with an artfully stacked pile of elegant coffee table books.

Different Patterns
Sweat equity gives you a big return when you change the patterns in a room, and add a few new ones. Collect paint chips in rainbow gradations of color; punch them into heart shapes or trace a heart cookie cutter and cut the hearts out. Then spray mount the hearts in ombre patterns on four plain stretched canvases, and hang the grid of new art over the sofa. Move that sofa, and the rest of the furniture, to create a new conversation area and different traffic flow in the room. Shift a favorite worn-out wing chair to a window and create a reading nook. Reupholster the chair yourself with the "strip-down, staple together" method. Remove the old upholstery, saving each piece to use as a pattern and photographing the order of removal. Cut new fabric and reattach to to the chair with a staple gun in the reverse order that you removed the old material.

Divide the Living Room and the Entryway

Many homes feature an entryway that merges into the living room with little or no visual distinction between one area and the other. This is more than a visual problem. The traffic from the front door disturbs people who are sitting in the living room. However, a couple of decorating tricks exist that allow you to create two distinct areas and solve other problems as well. By themselves each technique works well, but they work even better when used together.

Decide on a focal point in each area. The focal point from a decorating perspective provides a visual anchor; it “tells” the eye where it should start looking when it begins taking in the room's decor. In the entryway, a logical place to start would be a table placed by the door where people deposit their keys and the mail. In the living room, it could be the fireplace, a built-in bookcase or a piano.

Separate the two rooms using color. For example, if you love the decorating trend that pairs pink and brown together, paint the foyer brown and the living room pink, then tie the two looks together by placing objects in those colors in the opposite room. Each room will retain its individual flavor thanks to the different paint colors, but will also look tied together from a visual standpoint.

Take advantage of area rugs. Rugs also provide visual separation between areas. The rug in the entryway keeps some of the dirt that people bring in on their shoes off the living room carpet, whereas the rug in the living room serves to bring the furniture in the room together. Even if you have carpet on the floor in the living room, think about laying down a rug where you intend to put your couch and chairs; these pieces should be centered around the rug.

Use divider screens or freestanding bookcases to create a visual barrier between the two rooms. This also cuts down on some of the noise that comes in from the front door when it's opened.

Make sure the back of the couch or your chairs are facing the entryway; this functions as a subconscious barrier to the eye and indicates that the living room is separate from the entryway. You can further enhance this barrier by pushing a tall table behind the back of the couch, making sure to choose a table that stands as high as or higher than the back of the couch. Place decorative pieces like a dried flower arrangement in the middle of the table. This also tells the eye to “keep out” without looking obvious.

Decorate a Living Room With a Beach Theme

Even if you don't live by the seashore you can feel as if you do by decorating with beach theme decor. The challenge is to do it tastefully without making it look cheap. One way to get ideas for beach-themed decor is looking at decorating magazines. Most of the rooms featured in decorating magazines are arranged by professional interior designers. They use well-chosen accessories to give the room a classy look without going overboard. You can copy their ideas with basic accessories to give your room that designer look.


Paint and Furniture
Paint the room in a light color such as aqua, light blue, beige, yellow or white. Lightly colored painted walls will give the room an open, airy feel. Paint the ceiling either a light blue to mimic the color of the sky or paint it white. Paint the window frames white or a sand color to keep the overall feel of the room light. Use rattan furniture in the room along with a large sea grass rug placed under the coffee table. You will feel as if you are outdoors walking on the beach every time you enter the room.

Hot-glue shells onto the frame of a large mirror. Hang the mirror on the wall opposite of a wall with a window. The window will be reflected in the mirror to give the image of another window in the room, which will add more light. Hot-glue rope onto pillows for the sofa and chairs. Take a few small picture frames and hammer a brass tac or nail into each of the corners. Wrap rope around the them and tie it at the bottom in a nautical knot.

Place shells in a tall glass vase on one side table and an old lantern with a candle inside on the other. Place a large conch shell on the coffee table as a center piece. You can also fill glass-based lamps with shells, starfish or beach glass to add a little whimsy to your room. Using shells that you have personally collected will add special meaning to your room, or you can purchase bags of shells from a craft store.

Place beach-themed art on the walls. Place a large painting of the ocean or a sailboat above the sofa. Place photos of your family's trips to the beach in picture frames and group them in an entry way. Attach floating shelves on the walls and place beach photos, shells and candles on them in groupings. Be careful not to make the groupings look cluttered. Groupings of two or three items per shelf will add a touch of whimsy without being too much and will make it easy to dust and maintain.