As living rooms are among the busiest spaces in a typical family home, most of us will eventually find ourselves swamped by an assortment of unintended decorations.
Don’t wait until folks come over to visit before shovelling that mess out of sight. Keep your clutter in check while prominently displaying your prized decorations by including some of these nifty storage ideas in the living room.
1. Furniture With Drawers
The simplest way to add more storage space, at least without drilling any holes in the wall of your living room, is by selecting furnishings that come with drawers. A coffee table with discrete cabinet handles or a long console with ample drawers would be able to contain the clutter that typically accumulates on the coffee tables of family homes.
2. Shelving Feature Wall
Rather than having a purely decorative feature wall occupying usable wall space in your living room, consider incorporating shelving into the design of the wall decoration. Horizontal lines are abudant in these decorative fixtures – often used to create space-enlarging illusions; these surfaces could be easily converted into shelving with the addition of vertically oriented panels to support the weight of books.
3. Surround the Television
As we have mentioned previously, inundating your television in horizontal lines for shelving can serve to camouflage the screen against a backdrop of assorted decorations on display. The space on most walls around the television tends to be left empty in reverence to the screen, creating opportunities for shelving to be added.
4. Practical Walls
Let’s face it, walls are boring – but before taking out walls to aim for an open layout, consider replacing non-load bearing walls with dedicated shelving instead. With shelving in place of walls you get extra storage and display space in an area that has the airiness of an open layout, but with physical forms of separation cozily enclosing the living room with clean demarcating lines.
5. Alcoves in Walls
If the wall you wanted to take out leads to an immediate confrontation with your neighbour – or if it is load-bearing, consider cutting an alcove out of the wall instead. Just be sure to check with engineers to ensure that your alcove is adequately large for storage but small enough that the wall retains its supportive capability. If structural considerations do not permit cutting directly into the wall, build up a false wall or a facade to the depth that would accommodate your decorations.