what's the best way to work out if a sofa will fit in a room?

[mckenzie]

I can do a floor plan to scale on some paper and plot the fireplace and then add the sofa measurements?

Or I can lay out newspaper on the floor to the size of the sofa?

But it's not working for me and I just can't 'see it'!!

Is there an idiots guide of some sort that says if your floor space is X then a sofa/chair with a total floor space of Y will be fine??

Um, I measured the length of the space I had and how far I wanted it to come out into the room (used current sofa as a comparison) then found a sofa to match the measurements. Sofas due in a fortnight so I hope I haven't missed anything.

trouble is we don't have a sofa in there at the moment
(it used to be a children's playroom but we are re-claiming it as an 'adult only' lounge. yeah right, bet that lasts about 2 weeks )

Don't forget to check it will fit through your doorways!

i like the mattress idea - thanks maryz. We tried to haul a sofa from the back room to this front one to get an idea of size but it was just too heavy.
Off to get a mattress and some cushions (no cardboard boxes here unfortunately)

I didn't check to see if it would fit through doors but the one we have is massive and that got through ok so I'm hoping these will!

Take into account all doorways, hallways, corners, staircases etc that it will have to go via.

We had to remove a front door to get one into our old house -PITA.

we used newspaper cut to size

We measured the dimensions out with masking tape onto the floor, when we bought our corner sofa.

Put two dining chairs the right distance apart with a sheet over them

you could do a 3-d room plan on here and then choose a sofa with similar dimensions to see how it looks.

Sorry if I'm missing something, but can you not just measure the space to see if it will fit? Using, like, a tape measure? Novel idea I know

I LURVE mydeco too. Great site

Chairs and a sheet sound good- also I was going to suggest pillows

thanks for all the replies.
The issue is not so much
'will it fit in the room?'
but
'will it fit in the room and look okay, not too big and not swamp the room?'

That's the problem we're having. That plus DH and I have completely different ideas about what we would like.

I'm pleased to say though that my plan has worked and DH is now so fed up with going into shops and looking at brochures that he has told me that as long as it's comfortable then get what I want . He's only saying that because he cant be gracious enough to say he was wrong though. I did a to scale floor plan on graph paper and cut out little to scale shapes of the sofas he said would be good, and even he can now see that they would just take over the room completely.

So, off shopping AGAIN tomorrow but I have only to please myself (and the credit card). Yippee!