Downsizing Help: Choosing What Furniture to Leave Behind

Moving to a smaller space can lift a lot of the burdens from your shoulders. But it can also be fraught with decisions, like what furniture to keep and what to leave behind.

Editing your stuff can be a challenge. Don’t panic. Chances are, what you have is way more than what you want, and after a year in your downsized house, you will have happily forgotten about the things you left behind.

Since Mike and I downsized to a 600-square-foot bungalow last August, I am going to share with you our experience and the steps you can take if you’re scaling down too.

Decide what you love. We were downsizing from a home with an expansive great room. It happily housed a lot of furniture, including a fabulous antique Swedish secretary that had been with us for years, and that we were simply not willing to say goodbye to.

As we searched for a new home, our first thought was always, “Where will the secretary go?” So when we discovered a tiny California bungalow that had the perfect spot for the secretary, the deal was sealed.

Your new home needs to include your I-love-this-too-much-to-part-with-it pieces, or the experience of downsizing won’t be a happy one.


Measure, measure, measure. I cannot overstate the importance of this step. Even if your homeowner’s association, real estate agent or landlord supplies you with a floor plan, measure anyway! Those plans are almost never correct, and even a few inches can make a huge difference in a small space.

Get permission from the powers that be to spend an hour or so measuring your new home. It’s wise to measure all the rooms — but especially the major living spaces. I use a 25-foot tape measure rather than a 12-foot one, because it makes the job so much easier. Start with the basic room length, width and ceiling height, then measure the doors and windows, and finally add details like air conditioners, heating vents and electrical outlets. I use quarter-inch-scale graph paper and draw the rooms more or less to scale, but that is not necessary.

Shown here are the scribbled measurements from our new living room and minuscule dining room. Notice that I circled each dimension for clarity (allowance for my aging brain), and made little notes to myself about the space.


Your next step is to measure the width and depth of all the furniture you want to keep. My comfy chair with its soft slipcover was another piece critical to my long-term well-being. After all, it had been my retirement present to myself. Even though it was big for a small space, I was determined to make it work.


Make your own floor plan. Now that you have all the necessary measurements, you are ready to discover what will and will not work in your new space.

A computerized program for drawing floor plans is a must; my favorite is Thomasville Furniture’s room planner. Spend a little time getting familiar with it, and you will find it very helpful. You can accurately size not only each room but each piece of furniture.

You can see from our own floor plan that not much furniture from our great room was going to work. I was able to use my chair and our sofa, but the wing chair, my old iron and glass desk and chair, Mikey’s TV-watching chair and our coffee table were all too much and too big. We had to get rid of some pieces and get a couple of smaller-scale things, like a new coffee table and a pair of small-scale chairs.


Think outside the box. Our new home had two bedrooms. One of these would be the TV/guest room, so the master bedroom would have to include my office. In a future ideabook, I’ll discuss how downsizing requires imaginative use of double-duty rooms and double-duty furniture, as well as repurposed pieces.

But for now a case in point is the vintage glass and iron table that was my desk. It was going to be too deep for the master bedroom, but supposing we cut off its legs and made it our coffee table? It would be large enough to hold wine and appetizers, but would feel really light and wouldn’t overwhelm the room.

Mikey got out the circular saw and metal cutting blade, and just like that we had a coffee table and a repurposed piece checked off our list!


Shop outside the box. Downsizing usually includes some selling and some shopping. I’ll discuss how to dispose of all your extra stuff in another ideabook. But the bottom line is: Anything you sell will help finance furnishings for your new place. It’s like free money!

As for shopping, we had very particular — if unrealistic — expectations for the pair of small chairs we needed. They couldn’t be bigger than 2 feet square, they had to be comfy enough for people to sit in for a couple of hours, they had to mix well with our style, and they had to be inexpensive.

We were pretty sure we wouldn’t find pieces to meet those criteria in a furniture store, so we started haunting thrift stores, consignment shops and antiques collectives. And one day there they were: the perfect pair of small but very comfortable vintage Heywood Wakefield wicker chairs. Sold! All they needed to be perfect was re-covering the seat cushions.


Call in favors. If you have a group of friends who find free breakfast reason enough to help you move, rejoice! These wonderful people made our move a communal effort — and a memorable day.


Kudos, you’re done. Do you recognize our new living room from the floor plan? Careful preparation has made it a joy to live in and a pleasure to share, and it will do the same for yours.

I’ve illustrated this ideabook with just one room. All the rooms in your new home will require the same effort, but you’ll find that all that work is worth it.

Until next time, happy planning!

More: Downsizing Help: How to Edit Your Belongings

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