There are times that I worry that when I die someone will come into the house, and it will be like walking into a time capsule. You know, one of those homes that is still decorated and outfitted with everything from the 1950s. Think about the disturbed young chess genius in “Queens Gambit” when she had to redo her deceased mother’s house.
This will not happen in reality because we are constantly updating and adding to our home… much to the genetically Scottish Love-goddess’ dismay. However, the lower level in our retirement townhouse was not laid out in a manner that I would call optimal. It suffered from the two rooms available for our use serving totally unsuitable purposes.
The driving factor was that one single piece of furniture dictated where everything else was placed in the two rooms, all of this provided a challenging situation for entertaining. The largest open space in our home was generally unusable for larger social gatherings as it should have been.
After my final surgery… on my feet… I decided that I was going to change all of that. I conscripted a couple of friends to help me, and we had at it. I have to say, that I am really happy with the outcome. I even think the Love-goddess considers what I did well worth the effort.
However, when I met with my surgeon two weeks after the operation… and after the near completion of my reno project… he was not pleased with the state of my feet and their limited recovery. Apparently, getting all hopped up on pain killers and moving furniture and a million books around is not actually good therapy for surgically repaired feet. Who knew? I had to stop, but fortunately most of the work was already done… woot!
The official plan was to convert the large room into our media/entertaining space, because it would hold the largest number of people in party mode, and secondly, to convert the smaller room into a library.
Hopefully, this little photo expose will show you what our situation was, and what it became. I will offer up details and explanations as I go through the photos.
So, why am I telling you all this? Well, it’s because I learned that in the process of doing what I did, it is a really good idea to step back from your living area and take a good hard look at whether it continues to suit your purposes. And if not, what can you do to improve it by simply rearranging things… perhaps with minimal cost to you ?
Hopefully, this will get you to start thinking about your own living space and how you might improve on it – especially in light of the fact that we will soon be able to actually have other living human beings in our homes in the next few months.
Before I launch into what we did and how it worked out for us, a few brief words on something I learned in the process that helped me immensely in one small but important facet of our re-organization. That being, “IKEA hacks”.
When I went online in search of a way to build an inexpensive stand-up bar in front of the cabinetry that I now call my bar, I discovered that there are all kinds of people doing things with, and to, IKEA products that repurposed them, used them in different ways to save money, or modified them to improve their use. And of course, there is a website for that. Here is the one I used: ikeahackers.net.
Ultimately, I decided that a stand-up bar would result in too much stuff in the room and undermine what I was trying to achieve – so I abandoned the idea. This second link is to the bar solution I found if your interest has been tweaked. Be sure to follow the “Read More”.
However, looking for a solution to the bar issue led me to a simple answer for my “bar width measurement problem” that you will read about in one of the photos, – namely, adding legs to an existing cabinet.
This photo represents the reason all this happened. The pool table … beautiful piece of furniture that it was … was dominating the use of our largest usable space in the lower level, and the room beside it. The table was used from time to time of course, but it forced us to host social gatherings in our living room area, which is smaller than this lower area, or out on our outdoor patio… weather permitting.
As you can see here, the placement of the pool table resulted in everything else being forced out into the perimeter of the room. The only place people could sit comfortably was at the round glass-top bar table. The bar table would have been better situated near our little bar, but because the pool table had to be placed very strategically in the room to allow for unfettered play, this was not possible.
I think you can see better in this photo just how commanding the table was of the space. Even the bar seems to be an afterthought squeezed in right at the back of the room. There is all kind of open dead space. The room itself is just under 400 square feet, so a decent sized amount of space… potentially.
From this vantage point, you can see into the second room which looks decent from this viewpoint. It also shows you that there is a narrow entranceway between the two rooms that really makes both into distinctly separate areas. I’ve been talking with our contractor about opening up this wall. What you don’t see is just how terribly crowded and ill-suited it was for its original purpose.
Although we had a lovely new sofa, the seating in this room was extremely awkward. The only other place to sit is the black chair on the right. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that there was really only one way all this furniture would fit in. Even the electric fireplace is in the wrong place. It should have been centred under the window but had to be placed here so that it was centred between the couch and the television stand at the other end.
The area was primarily used for television viewing. Although it had the large sofa, the room only provided seating for about four people maximum. And it didn’t even qualify as a true media-room because all of my audio equipment and record albums and CDs were in the other room.
Even most of the art on the wall was out of scale and not thoughtfully placed. My bad. From this vantage point you also get a sense of the open unused space out in the other room.
And then I was struck by inspiration! This revelation meant letting go of the pool table and putting it up for sale. I took this photo right after the folks who purchased the pool table had a firm come to move it from our house to theirs. You can still see the footprints and shims used to level it on the floor. The other nice thing about selling the pool table was that it freed up a bunch of cash to add a few things to enhance the new living space. Again, you can really see how much open dead space had been created by the presence of the pool table.
TA Da! The reconfigured large room. The only things we bought and added to this room were two small IKEA Kallax shelving units. Oh, and yes, a new 75” Sony television, paid for courtesy of the pool table sale. 🙂
The bar table is now situated down by the bar and gives that whole area of much more defined presence. The best thing is that there is now ample room for lots of people to move around and sit. You can see one of the new yellow chairs we bought in the other room. When we have people over these can just be brought into the big room and used for additional seating as required. We have a number of folding chairs as well that will suit that purpose.
The simple addition of one more single Kallax unit greatly improved the amount of storage space in the bar area. We brought the glass cabinet out of the corner just to give it a bit of a more featured presence in the room. The new bar configuration presented a significant problem unfortunately. The three units could not be placed together as they were configured because their total width would interfere with the opening and closing of the door. The aforementioned “IKEA hack”… putting feet on the bottom of the horizontal liquor storage unit… allowed it to be raised up enough so that the flared feet from the glass unit could slide underneath it, and get the whole glass cabinet out of the way of the door. Problem solved.
I am really happy with how the new little library has turned out. The electric fireplace has been centred under the window, which provides more balance to the room. Additionally, it has a couple of comfortable chairs and a reading light. Even the art fits in better now.
To my thinking, it looks like how I imagine a library should look; tons of books, and lots of sciency things, global artifacts, and historical items filling in the empty spots on the shelves. There even ended up being some low shelving on which to place my small wooden boat collection that had previously been sitting on the dresser in the guest bedroom.
I did have to make some additional purchases for this room. I ordered one new tall bookcase and one new short bookcase from IKEA. The yellow chairs came from IKEA as well, but only cost $299 each. And yes, I did have to assemble them. Generally, the Facebook Marketplace sale of the pool table and other “priceless family artifacts” that we had kicking around the house paid for all of the new purchases.
The other benefit of this reorganization was that access to the hallway leading to the bathroom on the right, and the storage room at the far end of the hall, was improved. A chair and end tables had been blocking that direct route previously. Hmmmm … looking at all the books in these pictures makes me think I should follow my own advice like I did for grocery shopping. Stop buying books and start borrowing them from the library. 🙂
So, there you have it. The shaking up of our living space. The net result has been a definite improvement in both rooms.
As I said at the outset, perhaps this is something you might want to consider doing before things get back to normal in a few more months. Look and see what is getting in the way of making your living space more livable.
Is there a great big giant sofa that is dictating where everting else in the room is placed in one room, and not in a good way? Do you have too many knickknacks taking up too much space? Do you simply have way too much furniture crammed into one room? Do you have a couple of rooms where the purposes for each should be switched around like ours? If you’re retired, you’ve got the time, so give it some thought.
Very good project management techniques…but if your other friends follow your lead we will be having to go shoot pool in at some hotel of ill repute….
Giving up one’s pool table is like donating a kidney… So highly unlikely anyone else is going to do this. 🙂