Allie's Den

My longtime friend Allie had just bought her first house with her partner and was simultaneously excited and overwhelmed with DIY and layout possibilities. She especially wanted help with the den in the house since it was poised to be their most used room by far. The layout from the previous owner felt like a poor use of space, so we set out to explore options that maximized the space instead.

Constraints:

• The fireplace was positioned just high enough off of the ground that mounting a TV over top of it would have felt awkward

• The wanted plenty of comfy seating, but weren't locked into any specific pieces of furniture yet - Facebook marketplace was going to be the decision-driver in that department, however, so the plan needed to be flexible

• We needed to work with the quirkiness of the kitchen-to-den serving window and make it feel purposeful

• The path of travel to the patio door would be fairly high traffic, so we needed to keep that in mind with respect to the TV position

Since there was almost no set furniture in play, I was able to explore a bunch of fun arrangements with this project. In Option 1, I opted for sectional seating and 2 swivel chairs for flexibility. Although the path of travel to the patio door walks in front of the TV in this layout, it was wide enough that I felt okay about it. Option 2 tried to remedy that issue by mounting the TV over the fireplace - in theory this worked, and I ended up loving the symmetry of this layout. In practice however, we didn't want anyone breaking their neck to watch a show, so this option ultimately got scrapped.

In the end, Allie found an awesome brown, Facebook marketplace sectional that rendered both options impossible, but they stayed slightly closer to Option 1 in spirit. Her mom built a wooden mantle for the fireplace and Allie also painted the patio door to look like wood grain. These updates with the deep brown couch brought much needed warmth to the room and I like to think that my layouts helped as well, even if they got modified in practice :) Thank you guys for letting me help bring your first home together to life!