Graph Paper: Kicked Up a Notch

Perhaps it's a sign of my inner-nerd (I'm sure some would argue  that it's not so "inner") but, when I created the trick that I am about to share with you, I had to restrain from fist pumping and breaking out into a very exaggerated victory dance. For some this trick may seem trivial, silly even... and maybe the mysterious nature of this intro is an unnecessary lead in to the rest of this post...but (cue exaggeration), I think I may have made the world a little bit better of a place with this one.

I was given the task of redesigning a bedroom with dimensions that are slightly larger than a queen sized bed (60x80).

The redesign had to include the following:

1) Space for hanging clothes
2) Space for folded clothes
3) Desk/Study space (with an area for books and office supplies)
4) A queen sized bed
5) Space to walk ( perhaps the hardest component of this project)

I am a DIYer, not a magician, but I was determined to make this room functional, organized, and feel as spacious as possible.

Figuring out how much space, beyond the queen sized bed, that I had to work on was obviously an essential first step, but simply drawing a floor plan wouldn't suffice. So I DIYed some graph paper in Excel...here is how:

Highlight all of the cells by clicking the small triangle in the upper left hand corner of your workbook (A)

Click the "Format" button located in the Home ribbon to adjust your cells height and width (B)- your row height should be 9 and your cell width should be 1.

And there you have it: Excel graph paper. Awesome, huh?
and your scale? 1 box=1 inch.

This room is tiny and has a awkward shape which makes for quite a bit of unusable space. I wanted to know the exact dimensions of the areas that I could utilize so, instead of simply using lines out outline the floor plan, I used the number 1...it looked like this:

Dragging my mouse along a wall of 1's (and looking at the sum in the bottom right hand corner) told me how much room I was working with- no adding and no guesstimating.

From there, I created shapes (using the "shapes" tool under the "insert" tab) to represent different pieces furniture. I rearranged the shapes until I settled on the final layout. These shapes turned into my shopping list.

Moving? Rearranging? Make some excel graph paper...you won't regret it 

PS: For those of you who cannot get enough of this post (Excel graph paper is a riveting topic afterall), below is an image of the storage system that I installed in the room described above:

Desk? Check

Hanging clothes? Check

Folded clothes? Check

Horrible image quality? Check

The best part is that every piece that you see in the system came from the clearance section of the Container Store. I ended up working with a fantastic sales associate at the NYC (6th ave) store. She and I were literally scouring the store for discounted pieces (basement included). To say she hopped on my "made with pennies" bandwagon would be an understatement. Pauline, this is a shout out to you! Thank you for helping me turn an $800 project into a $192 project!