Decorating Your Home with Room Dividers

Kathy Burns-Millyard
Whether you use enduring fixtures such as a half wall, or a strategically placed couch, using partitions to divide up big spaces makes the most of your area while still allowing you to enjoy open plan living. Many rooms in your home need to work for more than one thing - regardless of whether you have large open areas - and all of these are just as significant as another. The living room may encompass a variety of distinct activities for instance, from quiet learning to music practice, from viewing tv to formal dining. The kitchen is frequently the place where everyday meals are eaten as well as prepared. Bedrooms double as dressing areas, playrooms, or studies; children's rooms are often shared.

Multi-purpose rooms require some type of integral organization to avoid chaos and confusion. Room dividers don't add to the space at your disposal, but they help organize it.

A room divider can be as lasting as a partial-height wall or as transient as a freestanding screen.

Sometimes it's best to use existing furniture such as shelves, a sofa, or chair as your room partition. Room dividers that give you additional usefulness make them even more appealing to use in your open plan areas. For example, a counter that hides kitchen clutter can also function as a breakfast bar; open cabinet shelves provide additional storage space for ornamental pieces and books while partly closing in a section of the living room.

Be careful the dividers don't weaken the prime qualities of the room - you want to design cautiously to avert blocking light or creating traffic constrictions. Equally, it's essential to operate with the intrinsic proportions and decorative quality of the room so the ultimate result appears well considered rather than improvised.

Room Divider Placement Points

Before you start, make a rough sketch of the space to evaluate the best way to divide it. Pay particular attention to entranceways, windows, and traffic routes around the space. The best organization is to put your room dividers in positions which allow all areas of the room to have natural light. This means the position of the windows is a fundamental factor in your layout. Also be careful not to obstruct main entryways or make it tricky to go about the room.

Think about how much space you want for each activity. Study areas can be quite consolidated, for example, whereas a dining area takes more space so that chairs can be moved easily back from the table. Splitting Up a common bedroom on the other hand, commonly consists of splitting the room in half to give each person an even amount of space.

When planning your area, keep in mind that dividers don't have to follow straight lines. A curved counter is an attractive way of separating a kitchen area in an open-plan space for example. In a similar way, a pair of narrow dividers projecting out from face-to-face walls to frame an area can provide more visual interest than a singular divider extending across the room.

Published by Kathy Burns-Millyard

Kathy is a professional published freelance writer, stock photographer, and website publisher living in Southeast New Mexico USA. 3 of her 4 children are in the military and she soon plans to move to a remot...  View profile

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