Living
room is the happiest place in any home where individual members start sounding
more like family. At my place, living room serves many functions – it’s an
entertainment area, dining hall, reading corner, games’ zone, and a family
space. With so much traffic, and of course, so many functions to serve, I knew
my living room needed more than daily cleaning to stay organized. Here are some
tips that help me big time in keeping it neat, orderly and fun. It’s our home’s
happy space; and, I wanted its every corner to be cozy enough to make the
family time relaxing, joyous and treasured.
FUNCTIONAL
ZONES:
Okay,
in order to make your living room practical and clutter free, you first need to
understand the purposes this room gets used for. This helped me equipping it
with right furniture and dividing it in distinctive zones. Clear demarcation of
distinctive zones doesn’t require erecting up a cemented wall; rather,
sometimes free standing storage shelves do the double duty. They nicely add to
the room storage and, without looking visually odd, smoothly separate one zone
from the other.
Why
it’s important? It keeps all the items belonging to one type of function at one
place. For example, you might be using your living room as your home office.
You would definitely not like to search for necessary business receipts under
the sofa, on the side table, and/ or worse mixed with magazines.
Functional
zones provide peace of mind and in a smaller area give the feeling of larger
spaces. You force yourself to leave one particular type of work at one place to
start doing another type of work. At least it compels me to be disciplined to
leave my laptop at office desk and have food on the dining table.
ENTERTAINMENT
CENTER:
Entertainment
center can either be the root cause of the mess or a focal point of the room.
Try to buy such furniture that lets you keep wires out of sight. If you are
able to make this heart of the room clean, the entire room will look sparkling.
TURN WALLS
INTO STORAGE:
In
smaller homes, storage is always an issue; and, I always recommend using walls
optimally to increase storage. Well, living room’s walls are the best to hold
all my books and living room related particulars. Stuffing entertainment room
with furniture just to increase few notches of storage, certainly, is not the
real solution.
MINI
BASKET FOR REMOTE CONTROLS:
AHHH! Lost remote control frustrates me so
much. Putting every remote control in a small basket is a big life saver for
me. I am now developing a habit of putting remotes back in baskets when I am
done watching TV. So, yeah I’m now 100% sure where to find this magical wand
again.
NEW RULES
TO FOLLOW:
ü If your living room isn’t spacious enough
for full size furniture, skip the conventions. Half sized furniture does just
fine.
ü For magazines, stick to the rule of
throwing one magazine out before bringing new one in.
ü After every gathering, spare five
minutes to reset the living room.
FLOOR IS
YOURS:
How
to do you keep your living room clutter free and yet relaxing and fun. I would
love to hear your tips.
