Family and Living Room Ideas
Tips to Organize Your Home's Living Room

Family and living room ideas for getting organized in this special space include maximizing the use of space with home storage solutions that are also stylish and comfortable.

Organizing your living room requires good home storage ideas,and regular application of the clutter control formula. This will prevent a messy room from taking over all the living space in your organized home.

Lots of homes, especially older homes, do not have separate spaces for "family room" and "living room" and families hangout together in the one room that provides them with their entertainment, reading, socializing, and sometimes playing activities.

Regardless of the way the space is configured in your home, the family and living rooms are intended to be a place where people can gather and spend time together.

The challenge for organizing your living room will be to create a space that allows these functions to happen while maintaining some order with the people and things in the room so everybody who uses the room can find what they need when they need it.

Everyone who uses the room should also take some responsibility for implementing the clutter control formula to make sure that your organized living room stays that way.

Living Room Ideas - Tips to Organize Your Home Space

It can be challenging to find the space to store everything that you want in your living room.

If you are living in a small organized home, searching new and innovative storage ideas may be the highest priority.

Here are some living room ideas that might help with organizing your living room stuff.

• use furniture that has storage capability - Storage ottomans can hold blankets or even DVD's.


• place storage benches under the window for extra seating or line up several ottomans of the same cube style to create a bench.


• if you have your sofa placed against the wall there is room back there you can use. A card table or folding chairs might fit back there and never be seen. Behind the sofa is the perfect place to store your gift wrap organizer.


• if you have an open plan living room and the sofa is not against a wall, create a storage unit at the back of the sofa instead of using a sofa table. You can use modular cube storage units and build a custom storage solution there. Open storage cubes would be good for display and you can used closed storage cubes for hiding away DVD's or CD's.


• invest in a storage coffee table


• use a remote control organizer to corral all those remote control units and they will never wander under the sofa again!


• use the corner space efficiently - a corner TV armoire is a great way to house your television in the corner and use space that might otherwise be wasted. It also protects your video equipment from dust and who likes to dust anyway?


• no foyer? - no problem - if your front door opens directly into a hallway or even your living room you can create entryway storage with a bench that has room for boots, shoes, or even coats.

Maintain Your Organized Living Room

• empty the living room of newspapers every night and make sure they go directly to the recycle bin. This is a great chore for someone's chore chart.


• keep magazines in a designated spot. A storage coffee table, magazine rack or even a storage basket could serve this function.


• limit your collectibles - if you want a showroom for your collectibles then you will have to build one. The living room is for people not things. Create displays of items that bring you joy, but make sure that the room serves its purpose which is to promote relationships between people not things.


• if you have a large room set up zones. A good zoning guideline would be entertainment, reading, and conversation. If you have other things that you want to use your family or living room for and you have the space you might create more zones.


• if you have a playing zone do a regular "toy pick up". This should be part of the responsibility of the people who use the toys. Young children will need assistance with this but over time children should be able to put away their own toys provided there is a designated place for them.


• limit the number of toys - if you have a play zone in your family room limit the number of toys that the children can have in there. Take the extra toys and put them in an "out of sight" storage area and rotate the toys so that every so often the children have a new adventure.

Living room ideas for organized living include not only arranging and storing your stuff in functional dual purpose furniture, but also developing good personal organization habits in the entire family so this special space can create the kind of family closeness and interaction you want.

by Beverly OMalley