Spatial Relations
One of my talents is that I'm pretty good at spatial relations. By looking and rotating objects in my head I can usually pretty accurately assess whether something is going to fit inside something else (Will that TV fit inside the back of the van? Will those books fit in that box?), how best to pack items into a given space (loading groceries in the car trunk or loading the dish washer) and so on. Best of all, I enjoy this kind of puzzle so I don't mind at all when these sorts of tasks fall to me. Right now I have a spatial relations challenge that I'm finding very distracting, mostly because it involves one immovable element so I can't actually try out any of my ideas to see how close I am to visualizing the answer.
Tuesday night, as we didn't have to return the van we rented for the summit until the next day, I got the brilliant idea to ask the visiting Steve (who had innocently offered to help me tote things earlier in the day) to help us move Tim's television. Tim had recently upgraded to a shiny new HDTV and was looking for a home for his big, HEAVY, older tv, which we happily agreed to take. He warned us that it was heavy and would take three or four big, strong people to wrangle but even so I think we underestimated what an ordeal it was going to be relocating it (helped in large part because the television stand came apart in transit and gave us a great deal of trouble, in addition to the heavy and awkward television itself). I dare say I had little idea what I was asking Steve to agree to when I asked if he'd help (and hadn't planned on asking Tim, still on antibiotics and recovering from some gunk, to help either) but they were troopers and we wrangled the television into the living room and into the only real space for it. This space is close to where I'd like the television to finally reside, but doesn't make me entirely happy. Unfortunately, since it weighs half a ton, I have to figure out and prepare the place for it before I press any more friends into service to move it.
Right now I have a small loveseat taking up half my dining room while I mentally move furniture and come up with the optimal arrangement for the new tv. As I do not want a loveseat in my kitchen indefinitely, I am eager to come up with a solution to this puzzle that doesn't involve having to remove too many pieces of furniture from the living room entirely. I guess I know what I'm going to be doing while Pramas is at the Alliance Open House this weekend!
Tuesday night, as we didn't have to return the van we rented for the summit until the next day, I got the brilliant idea to ask the visiting Steve (who had innocently offered to help me tote things earlier in the day) to help us move Tim's television. Tim had recently upgraded to a shiny new HDTV and was looking for a home for his big, HEAVY, older tv, which we happily agreed to take. He warned us that it was heavy and would take three or four big, strong people to wrangle but even so I think we underestimated what an ordeal it was going to be relocating it (helped in large part because the television stand came apart in transit and gave us a great deal of trouble, in addition to the heavy and awkward television itself). I dare say I had little idea what I was asking Steve to agree to when I asked if he'd help (and hadn't planned on asking Tim, still on antibiotics and recovering from some gunk, to help either) but they were troopers and we wrangled the television into the living room and into the only real space for it. This space is close to where I'd like the television to finally reside, but doesn't make me entirely happy. Unfortunately, since it weighs half a ton, I have to figure out and prepare the place for it before I press any more friends into service to move it.
Right now I have a small loveseat taking up half my dining room while I mentally move furniture and come up with the optimal arrangement for the new tv. As I do not want a loveseat in my kitchen indefinitely, I am eager to come up with a solution to this puzzle that doesn't involve having to remove too many pieces of furniture from the living room entirely. I guess I know what I'm going to be doing while Pramas is at the Alliance Open House this weekend!
Have you tried the "paper dolls" layout thing? (Cut out shapes from graph paper that represent the footprint of your furniture, then move them around on the graph paper map of your living room.) It's a lot less painful than moving furniture, although it doesn't give you a sense of heft or sight lines.
Good luck!