Raised Ranch Living Room with Different Layout Options

It’s time for another before and after! I’m so excited.

This is a new home for these clients, and they just really wanted some help on how to lay out their space. So I’m going to show you the three layouts that we proposed for them for this raised ranch style home.

Some of the challenges inside this space obviously, this was taken at like noon at the brightest time of the day, and you could see it’s dark in there. It really is very dark in this living room. They don’t get a lot of light due to the exposure of the home and there were no ceiling lights put into the living room. But there’s a big chandelier over here in the hallway, just right in the corner here, and then there is a chandelier in the dining room.

The dining room was not so bad. It was a little bit lighter, brighter, but the front living room, really where you’re going to hang out and things like that. It was dark. It was definitely dark, needed some more lighting. The lights that they did have were up high. So they don’t really provide much in terms of the lighting of the home because they just kind of light up instead of out and around because of the solid sheet on them. So those definitely need to get changed up.

We had this vintage piece over here that the husband really wanted to keep, it’s this nice round credenza here. So he definitely wanted to keep this. (Don’t mind the toilet there was somebody there doing a renovation in the bathroom while I was popping in. So he had moved the toilet into the living room, but of course that’s not usually there.)

So let’s take a look at the first layout option that we proposed to them.

Obviously, the dining room is just going to be where it is, right? So it’s going to be under the chandelier nice and centered. The kitchen is right over here. We didn’t render in the kitchen because we weren’t doing that, and the kitchen was new and bright and very contemporary.

These guys have a more contemporary style, and the style of the home was really a bit more contemporary, so we wanted to really play with that a bit. But of course we have the functionality of being able to watch TV, but we have this little partition railing going all the way through like many raised ranch homes. You’ve got this little railing that kind of goes at the top of the stairs and then these are stairs that lead down to the front door.

So just to give you guys some bearings on what this space looks like. So as you come up the stairs, you enter in this space this way, there’s a closet at the top of the stairs here with the door swing like that, and then you come into this space this way. So we wanted to keep it so that the traffic flow with entering into the living room here, or you could traffic flow into the dining room and the kitchen this way.

You can see if we go back to the before photo here, there wasn’t a lot of space under the window. This client really, really, really did not want to put furniture so that would block any bit of the window. So luckily there was enough space under the window that we were able to get a standard bench height, which seating was a priority in here. So we suggested adding a bench underneath the window here just to maximize some seating, and really make use of that space as we couldn’t put a chair or a sofa, or anything else against that window.

We suggested doing two, three seater sofa’s in this space, and hanging the TV on this wall just to free up some floor space rather than having it on a media unit, or something like that. That way when the, it was just two people. So when they’re watching TV they can easily sit here and watch TV, but then when they had company, usually the TV’s not going to be on when you have company, right?

When they had company it was great because you’re able to have your company sit over here and have a nice conversation circle. So you can put three buns here, three buns here, and then probably a person or two on the bench.

Then, instead of using a coffee table, we suggested using ottomans because ottomans are great that we could pull these out over here, and have more buns. So three, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 people all of a sudden can fit and converse in this space really comfortably with lots of room still for people getting in and out.

We also suggested layering in a lot more lighting and using lighting with a white or linen shade that is somewhat translucent. Linen is great because light comes through the linen, which means that your lampshade isn’t going to block the majority of your light, which is so important. Then we also wanted to bring in a couple of table lamps on this side.

Then we put the credenza that the husband wanted to keep right here in between the two spaces so that it would act as a focal point when you’re entering in the room.

We suggested putting a nice piece of art or something above it and then a few little decor pieces on that table. So it creates this beautiful focal point as you walk into this space. So that is layout number one.

Let me show you guys option number two.

This time, we moved the credenza right underneath of the TV to kind of hold the components and things like that. Oh, one thing I should mention is that the reason that we use a coffee table here with a shelf at the bottom, so it’s a coffee table that’s open with a shelf on the bottom is so that you could put the TV components there still. So it was easy still to use the remote and all those things and the cords could just hide right behind the sofa and go under to the table. So that’s really important too because when we have a TV, we have to think about those components and all the things that come with that.

So the next option was to still put the sofa, they had the sofa over on this wall where I have the TV, but I suggested putting it actually against the railing instead because really there’s not much to see through the railing. The railing was kind of dated. It’s not anything to look at, it’s not some really pretty glass railing or something like that. So let’s put the sofa in front of it. This time we used two upholstered chairs on either side, now using an upholstered chair on the side meant that we didn’t have enough room to fit…

We didn’t have enough room to put a bench on this side because what would happen is it would just kind of bump into the and feel really clumsy and cluttered over here. So didn’t have enough room for that. This option doesn’t seat as many people, but what we suggested was instead of having an upholstered bench here under the window, that we do the upholstered bench as the coffee table so that it could move around the room, and you could move this out over here for more for more people, or you can move it up against the one kind of pushed in the corner, it wouldn’t look as good aesthetically for everyday use, but you could easily put a couple of cushions to make it some comfortable seating when you do have guests over.

Again, we used four lamps in this space. This time two floor lamps over here behind the chairs, and then two table lamps flanking the sofa.

Then as we come up into the space, we still wanted to create a focal point right here because we don’t want to leave just this empty wall space. When you’re coming up and you’re looking at the room, you want something to look at, you want something to focus on and that’s a perfect place to put a focal point. So we suggested having a tall cabinet there, something where they would be able to store some of their China, and serving plates from the dining area, but still that would look really pretty. So maybe something with some closed doors at the bottom for the messy stuff, and then on top of it would be a really pretty place to store some of those heirloom items.

Then the last option that we did here is this layout, which this was one of the clients favourites and we really liked it as well because it was a creative solution.

This time, the TV is actually built in. We placed some shelves, some built-ins along this railing to close off that railing, because it wasn’t serving any purpose being open, it didn’t really let any of the light in or anything like that. The room was already dark. What we suggested was actually building the TV into these bookcases here and hanging it into these bookcases so that the components had a place to live on the shelves, and that allowed them to put this nice big piece of artwork here behind the sofa so that when you come up into the space you’re not looking at a TV, you’re looking at a really nice piece of art.

I’m able to use again the upholstered bench underneath the window, which is great because you can throw toss pillows on it. When people come over, it provides comfortable seating. We did the upholstered ottomans again instead of a coffee table so that they could move around the room. You could easily pull these over here when you have company over up against the bookcases, they can do a pillow and then nice big three seater sofa with lamps on either side.

We still had another lamp over here for nice lighting, and we could have done another floor lamp here but we decided to do a plant just so that it didn’t get too repetitive and boring.

We reused the credenza here with a large piece of art as our focal point on this end of the room so that again, we have someplace to store dishes and things from the dining room, but it created this focal point into this space.

So let me know guys. Which of these layouts was your favourite?

The client really liked the third one, and then they also liked the one with the two chairs. That was kind of the ones that they were deciding from.

I think that there are a lot of pros and cons to everything. When you’re dealing with a challenging space like this where you have an open railing, and I know a lot of you guys probably have these raised ranch style homes, that’s definitely something to consider.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to point out in this is the drapery here. So the previous owner had done the drapery and my goodness – this is just NOT how we would typically do the drapery.

So let me just show you guys what we would do, and what we recommend doing with the drapery. This is not something that they were going to do right now, this something that they’re going to do down the line, because honestly they had other priorities other than replacing drapery that was pretty well brand new. But it was done by the previous owner, they didn’t love the way that it looked either.

So the nice thing is that they did go all the way down to the floor, which is the right way to do it, but when we’re hanging draperies, we actually want to dress walls, not windows. Walls not windows. The natural point for these draperies would be right about here. See how this right here is this nice straight line right into this wall.

So these draperies actually should be, they would probably cover this side of the molding and go all the way across this wall and come down like this to the ground.Then now all of a sudden it doesn’t feel like we have this weird kind of shrinky window, and this awkward Bay window up top. It’s going to make that architectural feature of the Bay window just really shine and just really look like it’s supposed to instead of cutting it and adding those awkward little bends. So just a quick tip on that in case you guys have an awkward window like this. This is what we would normally do. Let me just draw this all the way down to the ground, it’d be kind of pooled up anyways and you could just see how much less squishy that looks. It looks much more grand. It really highlights the vault in the ceiling.

What we would typically do in this case is add, for light coverage and for privacy we would do just some thin roller shades or something like that on these windows. So that you could still pull them down, but they’re not going to be obtrusive. They’re not going to create this weird jagged line in the thing here. So let me erase one side so you guys can see the difference, it really does make a big difference. See the difference in this, if we were to just do half this window, see the difference in doing it all the way to ceiling but also putting it on the wall versus the window, so we’re not covering up part of the light because this room desperately needs the light.

We’re not squishing our drapes all together, all sad, and we’re not creating this weird, this is such a weird angle here. That just detracts from that window and makes it look awkward instead of beautiful. This is a really beautiful window, so I’m just wanted to point that out as well.

I hope you guys are enjoying these videos, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Bye for now.