A Hospitable Living Space

When Alice and I got married in July 2010, we had the great privilege of setting up our first home together. When we went about doing this we had no real idea what we wanted. Well, that’s not completely true, I know I was excited about getting a new TV. But in terms of where things would go, we weren’t really sure what we were going for.

Now, after nearly two years of marriage, we’ve got a better idea of how we want our living room to be set out. We’ve realised that we want it to be set out in order to better welcome people into our home.

As our living space currently stands, we have 1 couch and an ottoman facing a TV and a dining table. So when people come over we generally sit in a line facing the TV with one person sitting on either a dining chair or an ottoman. Not the easiest way to carry a conversation.

Our reasoning behind this set up was mainly that the TV is on the same wall as the antenna plug, which saves a long and ugly cord.

However, we’ve come to decide that a long cord isn’t that big an inconvenience, and we would rather have an area where we can easily speak to friends and family that come over. So sometime in the near future we’re going to buy a second couch and set up our room to look more like this.

A lot of the dead space that was once in our living room will now be taken up and we’ll be able to have more people seated on comfy couches, which is always a good thing!

We believe that it’s important for our home to be welcoming to people when they come over, so that we can share with them and actually talk with them rather than just sit in front of a blank TV with them.

It’s taken us nearly 2 years to learn this important lesson about the set up of our living room, but we’re glad we’ve finally gotten there.

(NB: I used a free iPad app called Ballard Room Planner to make up these scale diagrams of our living room, definitely worth using if you’re looking to do something similar)