Best Laid Plans.

An inquiring sfgirl reader asked last week if I could put together a floor plan of the apartment in its latest incarnation, as to see it from a better perspective, so here I am gladly obliging.

I actually love doing floor plans - the fun, grid-lined paper and rulers, colored pencils and sharpies all make my heart sing a little bit, and remind me of my days in design school, oh so way back when. So, here is a little sketch of Chez Victoria as it stands today, not entirely, perfectly to scale, but you get the idea.

There are lots of tools out there to assist you with your own floor plans, if you're not one for drawing them yourself. There are life size furniture cutouts you can purchase at Design Yourself Interiors if you need help literally visualizing the room with the furniture in it. You can find a Peel 'n Stick Home Quick Planner at Home Plans. Or, if you like to change things as much as I do, you can sign up for the Icovia Space Planner Design Editor, an online drag-and-drop program with tons of furniture icons you can customize to create virtual rooms right on your computer screen. Or, you can just rough it the old-fashioned route, like me with pen and paper. No matter which you choose, I think it's always a great visualizing tool to put it to 'paper' one way or another to help determine if it's all going to work or not. But then, sometimes I just start pushing furniture around and get a lot of exercise. Either way, it's always a fun and expensive way to change it all up without spending a bunch of money.

Life size cutouts from Design Yourself Interiors.

Online Interactive space planning from Icovia.