Fresh Perspective in the Pandemic - Free PDF Room Planner

Is it just me or is all of this extra time spent at home during the pandemic making you rethink your space? Suddenly that couch look stale, the clutter seems to be climbing the walls, and that paint color is showing its age. It's time for a fresh perspective, time to interject some beauty in our much smaller worlds. So to help my readers through the Pandemic I have created a Free PDF Room Planner. You could use this planner to come up with a new layout for any space in your home, or save your design concept and use it as a conversation starter with an Interior Designer when the economy reopens. Either way have fun with it!

FLOOR PLAN
So how do you actually use this tool to help you clarify your design for a space? Let me walk you through it. First begin by drawing the existing layout of your room. To do this imagine that all of the furniture has been removed. Then imagine someone has cut your entire room with a magical knife at exactly three feet above the floor and you are looking down at the entire room from the height of your ceiling. What would you see? You would see the walls, the windows, doorways, openings, fireplaces, and closets. From that height they would look like an outline of the space. This "perspective" that we are imagining is called a Floor Plan and that is what you will need to draw on the graph paper portion of the Room Planner. Now one of my pet peeves as an Interior Designer is graph paper that is drawn to what I would call an awkward scale such as 3/16" because it makes it more difficult to quickly translate a room's measurements when using the Imperial Scale. (As a quick refresh the Imperial Scale is a system of measurement that is used in the USA and its basic units of measurement are feet/inches. It is standard practice to use this system of measurement as an interior designer in the States.) So since I don't want to start a room design by trying to divide 3/16" into fourths I don't want you to have to either, which is why I love that this Room Planner has a grid drawn to 1/4"=1'-0"scale. This means that each 1/4" square equals 1 foot. So now that we know what we want to achieve get out your tape measure and get to work measuring each wall, window, doorway, etc. Then draw the existing Floor Plan of the room to scale so that you have something like this:

FURNITURE PLAN
Once you have the existing layout for your room drawn up it is time to draw a Furniture Plan. Drawing a Furniture Plan to scale makes it so much easier to see how furniture will actually occupy a space, and it is an essential part of any interior design I create. To do this cut out pieces of paper to represent each of the furniture items that currently exist in your space making sure that they are cut to scale. Then try positioning just one or two pieces of furniture at a time. Continue to add furniture pieces until you have created a Furniture Plan that feels balanced, and remember just because a piece of furniture started off in the space doesn't mean it needs to end up in the space. You also might find that you need to add a new piece of furniture/or replace a piece of furniture to make your space work.

(Designer Tip - Make sure that you have enough space between the furniture for people to move around the room comfortably. )

CREATE YOUR PLAN OF ACTION
Now that you have your Furniture Plan completed take a look and see if you have any furniture items that are leftover and didn't make the cut. Write down those items under the Edit List. Take note of the furniture items you are keeping as well and any items that you need to purchase/procure. You will see that the template provides you a space to keep a list of these items as well.

GET INSPIRED

Now that you have created an amazing structure for your room it is time to have some fun! Choose a texture, a pattern, and something that inspires you. These blocks of inspiration should influence the style of any new furniture pieces that you would like to purchase, and they should also work with any existing pieces that you will be reusing in your design. They also should be the source of inspiration for any accessories you might want to add to the room such as pillows, artwork, and decor. For my design I chose a soft, plush, red velvet to be the inspiration for my texture because of its visual and tactile warmth. The pattern I chose is a classic; The Schumacher Iconic Leopard Fabric in Brown. Remember this is just your inspiration for pattern. I could see this pattern being translated into some beautiful accent pillows on the sofa, or even a great carpet. Finally for my inspiration block I chose another fabric by Schumacher (Have I ever confessed to you how much I LOVE fabric!); The Schumacher Leaping Leopards Fabric in Blue. This pattern would make a great wall covering, drapery, accent pillow, or maybe I would just play off of the colors in the fabric and try incorporating the bold blues and tans into the furniture pieces. 

COLOR PALETTE

Finally its time to pick your color palette. You can pull colors from your blocks of inspiration or you can try to create a neutral color palette to contrast against the more vibrant colors as I did in the example room plan. Either way I have provided you with four squares for your color palette. This number was not arbitrary because every room needs at least three paint decisions to be made. You will need to think of a color for the walls, ceiling, and trim/mouldings in the room. The fourth square is for instances where you want to add an accent wall, or perhaps you have a chair rail in a space with the lower half one color and the upper half of the wall another color. 

Now that you know how it works give it a try! Here is the link to the free download  Room Planner. I would love to hear your experiences using it so please share your comments with me, and let me know if you have any ideas for how to improve it. I know that I will be taking this template with me on future Design Consultations. Even if it just gives you a plan that you put in place post pandemic it will get your creative juices flowing, and give you something that hopefully widens your world a bit more today. Stay safe and be well!