Practical Tip: Measure and Scale on Paper Before Rearranging Your Home - As-salamu alaykum

As-salamu alaykum - moving furniture can be a real hassle. Besides risking damage to the room, the furniture, or even hurting yourself, you might end up hauling everything only to discover it doesn't fit and you have to do it again. If you'd like to know what to bring out of the moving van first, where each piece will go on the first try, and be confident everything will fit, try this simple method: 1. Measure each piece of furniture (length and width). Round up to the nearest half-inch if you're using inches. Always round up for furniture so you give a little extra room. 2. Measure the room's floor dimensions. Note doors and which way they open, windows, and if possible, outlets and baseboard heaters. 3. Take a sheet of paper and leave a small margin for notes. For example, a standard A4-ish area on small paper might be about 27x21 cm usable space - leave a couple mm around the edge. 4. Now do some simple math. If the room is rectangular, use the room length; if square, start with the room width so your scaled room fits on the paper. Divide the room's real length by the paper length to get your scale factor. Keep either metric or imperial consistent when measuring, though you can choose different units for drawing if that helps you. EXAMPLE: Suppose the room is 144 inches by 90 inches and your paper usable area is 27 cm by 21 cm. 144 ÷ 27 = 5.3. That 5.3 is your scale factor. Divide every measurement you took by 5.3 and treat the result as centimetres on your paper. A loveseat 34x70 inches becomes about 6.4x13.2 cm on the paper; a side table 12x13 inches becomes about 2.25x2.45 cm. 5. Using that scale, draw the room on the paper and mark doors (and swing), windows, heaters, etc. On another sheet, draw each furniture piece as a small labeled box - color-coding helps. Now you have a tiny 2D paper model of your room and furniture. You can move pieces around on the paper until you find an arrangement you like, without lifting a thing. 6. When you've settled on a layout, take a photo of the paper plan and follow it while moving. Insha'Allah everything will fit and you only have to do the heavy lifting once. This method also works for arranging wall art (treat the wall as the ‘room’ and frames as ‘furniture’) or for placing garden boxes and sheds in a yard. Sorry for any typos - I turned off autocorrect and my fingers are clumsy 😄