It can be overwhelming to know where to begin when it comes to organizing your small living room. Within such a small space, it’s easy for your magazines, board games, DVDs, and trinkets to become a frenzied disarray. However, with a little strategy, you can create more room and comfort no matter what.

Clear Off All Visible Spaces

When it comes to organizing any small space, the best way to begin is with the items you can already see. A lot of how a space feels is about what is visible in the room. Keeping clutter at bay will instantly free up the space.

Remove these items:

• Trays

• Remotes

• Tabletop Books

• Miscellaneous Items

Lay these items out on your living room floor. Use your floor as a holding space while you get everything organized. It’s important to remember that countertops and flat surfaces aren’t storage. You’re going to want to find a new home for all the small items that clutter your flat surfaces — one that is functional and aligns with the item’s specific purpose.

Pull Out Items From Drawers And Shelves

Once you’ve removed everything from flat surfaces and other visible spaces like bookshelves or floating shelves, it's time to dig into the recesses of your small living and pull out those items that are hiding. Dig in the backs of the drawers in your TV stand, shelves along your walls, or any other storage areas you have in your small living room and lay out all the junk hiding away.

Declutter Your Small Living Room

Once you have everything laid out across the floor of your small living room, it’s time to dive into the decluttering process. It’s important to declutter your belongings before you organize them, so you can get rid of everything you don’t actually need to keep around in your small living room.

Placement Of Furniture In A Small Living Room Layout

Before you put anything back in a new place in your living room, you’ll need to tackle your largest space sucker: furniture. In all honesty, navigating the placement of furniture is the most difficult aspect of keeping a small living room organized.

Living rooms aren’t used to store much, so that’s the easy part. But, when you want to veg out in front of the TV and watch your favorite film, you want your space to feel roomy and comfortable while you’re doing so.

If you aren’t planning to cut your couch, side table, TV stand, or armchair out of your small living room, then you’ll need to create a game plan to place them in the best possible locations, so you don’t feel cramped.

One way to do this is to have dividers or screens between sections, like mentioned above. Another way to achieve this is to turn your furniture inward so that there are smaller sections of the room.

Instead of lining your couch and armchair against the wall and keeping the middle of the room open, turn your furniture inward around your coffee table to create the illusion of space.

You can also stack furniture pieces in front of each other to maximize space. For example, place your couch in front of your bookshelf or shelf. If you go this route, just make sure there is still a little bit of space between items so that you can get to what you need.

Categorize Items By Their Use

I’ve found that the best way to categorize items in any room is to sort your items by the specific purpose they serve.

In a living room, this might look like keeping all of your remotes near the DVDs, laying your yoga mat and bell weights by the TV you watch workout videos on, or piling your blankets and pillows in a cute basket right next to the couch.

Some potential categories include:

• Remotes

• Movies

• Music

• Books

• Decor

• Games

• Blankets

By following these tips, your tiny living room should be organized in no time!