Grab a Scrap of Paper and Sketch Your Bedroom - Blog 3; Improving Your Layout

A room layout on paper can give you insight on where to place your furniture before you actually place it in the room.

Hello friend,

I'm going to ask you to do something wonderfully simple and wonderfully clarifying: sketch your room on a piece of paper.

Not a perfect drawing. Not something to show anyone else. Just a rough, quick sketch that helps you see your space from above. This is one of the most useful tools I found for people rethinking their bedroom layout, especially when seasonal depression makes decision-making feel exhausting.

Here's what to do. Grab a piece of paper; any paper will do. A page from your notebook, the back of an envelope, a sticky note if that's what you have. Now, gently sketch your room, as if you're looking down at it from above. You are drawing a birds-eye view.

That's it. That's your foundation. A simple rectangle with rough proportions. If you want to (absolutely not necessary at this time), you can measure each wall length with a measuring tape (or using the measuring feature on your i-phone) and jot those numbers on the corresponding wall on your sketch.

Why does this matter? Because once you have this basic shape on paper, your mind stops trying to hold all the information in your head. You are no longer trying to imagine your room three dimensionally while also feeling overwhelmed by seasonal depression. You've externalize the problem into something concrete you can look at and adjust.

Using regular paper or a piece of graph paper, whatever you have, draw your room layout as you see in the photo above. With graph paper, one square represents 1 foot by 1 foot; So, for example: a 10 x 10 foot room starts at one box and extends 10 boxes (10 feet in length) and then draw a line down 10 boxes to show the width of 10 feet. Use a pencil so you can erase. Keep it light and loose. This isn't architecture; it's just a way of seeing clearly.

Some people find the steps so helpful that they never go further. They look at the simple sketch and suddenly understand why their room feels cramped or confusing. Something shifts when you see your space from above instead of from inside it.

If you're feeling up to it, keep the sketch nearby. We'll add to it in the next post. For now, you've done something important: you've started paying attention.

We won't actually circle back to this layout for a number of weeks as this blog topic cycles every 10 weeks. If you can't wait until then, try drawing in each piece of furniture from your bedroom on the sketch; choose a wall that seems most reasonable for the space that you have. So for now, don't move anything. We are just working on paper this time around. We'll work on the moving part next time. Try not to get overwhelmed with this. If you do some drawing and start to understand where your bed and furniture best fit in this bedroom, you can draw several ideal layouts and move the furniture only when you have arrived on the best layout.

I am on your side, Jeanine