INTERIOR DECORATING Life-size templates help ease challenge of furniture placement

Two interior designers came up with the idea out of frustration.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Buying new furniture can be a perplexing task, and deciding on styles, colors and pattern is only part of the challenge. There are also knotty questions of scale: Will that overstuffed sofa and armchair fit into your living room? Will that table be dwarfed by your dining room?
The standard advice has been to draw up your room on graph paper to one-quarter-inch scale. Trouble is, most of us don't have the math skills to do it, or the ability to visualize a room that way.
Now, there's help for the spatially challenged: Design Yourself Interiors' Life Size Furniture Templates. Created by two interior decorators, the product features four options (bedroom, living, dining and family rooms).
Standard shapes, sizes
Each kit ($29.99, $110 for all four) includes multiple templates of standard furniture shapes and dimensions.
The idea is to lay them on the floor to see how furniture might fit in a space, and how different layouts might affect traffic flow, says Kathy Wagner, who developed the product with her partner, Melody Davidson.
"And they are easy to fold down or cut if you need to," Wagner says of the templates, which are printed on heavy kraft paper.
They created the templates out of frustration, Wagner says. "We'd worked with scale drawings for years, but we found they didn't really help our clients. We thought there has to be a better way."
So far, interior decorators have been their biggest customers. "Professionals can make mistakes," says Wagner.
"And when you do, you are the one who eats the cost of that extra chair that doesn't fit."
To order, call (866) 692-6700 or visit www.designyourselfinter-iors.com.
Before you build
If you're building a new house, knowing where the furniture will go in relation to doorways and electrical outlets is critical.
To be sure everything is in the right spot, the experts say, you should have a plan in place before the first stud goes up.
To help with that, there's the E-Z Decorator Furniture & amp; Room Planner ($225), which includes a clear overlay with a grid to place over architectural plans, and more than 1,700 press-on furniture and accessory forms.
To order, visit www.ezdecor-ator.com.