Floor Plan

As I mentioned in my post about our couch, the floor plan of our apartment leaves a little to be desired.  While I love the open layout, it’s a little too open when it comes to the living room area.  That’s not to say that an open layout doesn’t ever work, but when you have a limited amount of space, you have to be a bit more creative with your furniture arrangement.  Apartment Therapy recently held a competition called Small Cool, in which people entered photographs of their teeny-tiny, tiny, little, or small apartments, and readers voted on the coolest Small Cool.  One look at some of these tiny (mostly NYC) apartments made me realize how luxurious my 815sf apartment really is.  Nevertheless, I’m still thinking about ways in which our apartment “shell” could be laid out better.

Here’s a glimpse into my architectural mind.  Drawing a floor plan of my apartment and redesigning it is a completely normal activity for me!

The room sizes are somewhat rough since I measured them pretty quickly.  You get the idea, though.  If we were to put our couch and tv in the space intended to be the living room, it would look like this…

For those of you who aren’t used to reading floor plans, this is too cramped, especially when you consider that the couch reclines to about five feet.  When not reclining, the distance between the foot of the couch and the face of the TV stand is about 3’-6”.  To give you a little perspective, a typical exterior door is 3 feet wide.  That’s way too close!  Also, this is the only feasible configuration because we want to hide the rat’s nest of cables and cords by positioning the TV against a wall.  With only two walls, our options are limited.

My redesigned floor plan is simple...

…add a small wall near the entry and remove a large portion of the long wall next to the fridge.  I’m pretty sure the wall next to the kitchen is not a bearing wall, and even if it is, there are easy structural solutions to this change.

Now the furniture works!  Too bad I can’t change it in real life.

Happy Friday the 13th!