It’s a beautiful drizzly day in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m not letting it go to waste. After a delicious brunch at our usual place and a little antique mall window shopping with my brother, I came home and dove into one of my favorite projects: re-arranging the furniture.

Here’s our living room. It looked good already, and it was pretty functional, although sometimes it felt a little tightly packed with all our big furniture (two seven-foot couches, three end tables, a five-foot coffee table, a comfy chair and that big pouf I made last fall). But sometimes even when things are good, I like to switch them up anyway, just for fun. I love new things.

I tried a bunch of different options. The couches are both two-piece sectionals, so I tried making some L shapes:

I didn’t care for either of those very much.

The floor plan is really open, so we can either go with that plan and leave lots of walk-ways through the living room to the kitchen, dining room, hallway and patio doors, or we can strategically close off walkways to make the space feel cozier and, well, more like a room. Here’s an attempt to close off the walkway to the patio, leaving a sort of hall way behind the couch:

But the couches are just too big for that option to look very elegant. Everything looks kind of cramped and you end up with even less usable space.

In the end, I liked the very first thing I tried, which looks like the option above but reversed, opening up the space toward the patio doors and hall:

It doesn’t really photograph very well. And the dents in the carpet drive me a little crazy. And actually, I’m not sure I like it better than it was before. I wonder if it would feel more balanced if I switched the cream and mauve couches around, so the back wall was visually a little lighter, and the area closer to the patio doors a little more visually anchored.

We’re going to live with it for a couple weeks and see. Maybe we’ll just go back to the way things were. Or maybe I’ll keep playing around with it all day, because it’s just that much fun.

Any layout input? Feel free to share in the comments.

I can’t remember the last time someone left a non-spam comment here. Just sayin. You’re welcome to. If you like. No pressure.