There's nothing to comfortably SIT on in the room. .................It may "work" , but it doesn't look too great, and renders the area looking cluttered.. With a rug in the middle. Why worry about what lines up with what?

Yeah, it's not ideal. Right now the content of the room reflects the way it is being heavily used. The kids play on the floor, or use the computer, or play the piano. We eat at the kitchen counter quite a lot.

There's a dining room / proper living room off the kitchen going in another direction.

I'm sure we can improve on the way the room looks while keeping it a bit of a kid's area and maybe we should be taking more measures. :) Anyway, adding a rug seemed like it might be a good step to take, hence my question.

I'm all for kids playing. BUT! You needn't turn the house over to them. Show the adjacent spaces. Maybe the piano has another spot. Maybe that could be closed toy storage instead. Or a decent spot for the computer. As of now? sorry..........all "function" no style or comfort seen: ) Sorry. , all I see is clutter.

looking at your first picture the rug is too far to the right side wall. I would center it in the room

Jan, fair enough & point taken. For now, the piano and computer have to stay. If anything, its entirely possible that we'll reconfigure the room to accommodate a somewhat larger or better piano. In some future iteration, it may be that this room becomes the music practice room. But that said, I could probably stand to haul everything else out of the room and figure out how best to augment things.

Project for today, though, is figuring out of the rug works, or if I should revisit using it in there...

Melissa R,

Let's say I center the rug on the room. Stupid question: Does it bother you that the right piano leg would be sitting off the carpet? Or does it look fine?

Moved a few of the annoying toys for this shot. :p

Sorry for the distractions, btw. I've been racing to get to this room before my children wake up.

With everything you have in the room, and with no plans to change anything, I'd not use a rug at all. Having a small one under the piano and a larger one centered on the fireplace really doesn't work. Area rugs are usually anchors for seating, and since you don't want or need a sitting area in front of the fireplace, then it serves no purpose. Leave it as it is until you can limit the function of the room to either a sitting area, play room or music room.

With all that is going on in the room, the patterned rug just adds to the “clutter” IMO. If you must have a rug for softness with kids on the floor, I would get a light, textured solid color.

I think the rug is pretty but honestly, the room needs a lot of attention that is not your priority right now, so a patterned rug will hide A LOT of debris while a solid color one will not. A rug makes the area comfortable to play on. It's too big but many other things are equally distracting so I would just keep it if it's a hassle to return. It's a room for kids to play!

OK, takeaways so far:

1. The two rugs idea doesn't help. So nix that one.

2. If I use the big rug in this room, it's probably best to center it on the room, not some other way.

3. Since there isn't currently one central activity taking place in the room, there isn't one central feature that the rug is supposed to be anchoring. So the rug is kind of unmoored and might be making things busier.

So, some things for me to think about are:

-Maybe don't use a rug in this room

-If I could limit the functions of this room or get it one primary function, that would be a good endgame. Maybe this needs to be the music room only, with our without that computer ninjed into the corner.

If this is the function of the room for the time being, maybe try a smaller round rug centred off the fireplace.

Will the rug affect the acoustics of the piano if it's under it partially, etc.? I'm not a fan of rugs as I find they're hard to maintain but the idea of a rug for a play area is appealing. Perhaps you want to draw out your room's layout with measurements and see if another rug size or placement would make sense for that? What's on the other side of the fireplace? I think it's great that your kids have a room near the kitchen where they can play the piano, play and use the computer. How practical for a family.

The rug would look better centered in the room. Why does the piano need to have a rug under it? Remove the clutter of pictures over the computer. Mantel is a little cluttered as well.

It’s a wonderful family room, so handy to the kitchen where you can keep an eye on things. Lucky you.

The space makes no sense and IMO instead of thinking about a rug get to work on some storage for sure . All I see is clutter everywhere build a nice reach shallow pantry on the wall where the open shelves are that will control the clutter. Then decide what you want to use this space for , right now just a hodge podge of stuff. I think it needs to be a playroom as it is the office needs to be somewhere else the art in the corner needs to be lower and all on one wall to make sense. Decide what the space is for then worry about a rug.

Everyone is saying same thing, right? Yes. If you MUST have the rug, butt a long side to the raised hearth, and let some floor show, on the opposite side.

You'd do well to show your other spaces. Sometimes, possibilities exist, that you may not SEE.

I CAN'T EVEN IMAGINE piano practices in combo with the noise of a dinner prep. Even if Mozart lives there : )

The rug warms up the room and gives it interest and warmth. A bare floor with all the furniture around the outside in my mind isn’t as attractive.

Just centre as best you can so piano legs are not a problem or try piano on wall on the right which may work - bonus is having room for a cubbie like piece, so toy storage is centralized and you could add a cute Roman blind to tie in with a color in the rug

If you made small changes, your room could become a bit more functional and organized as well as pretty Lol.

Move the framed items on the two walls near desk (and from what I can see on wall left of fireplace) to be one grouping and don’t hang as high.

As the fireplace is the focal point in room, accessorize mantle and you could add baskets for toy storage vs the red bins

Actually, you can have a pretty and functional room at the same time and I know plenty who do. You have to make conscious, good decisions and it helps if you enjoy doing so.

The first thing I would do in that room is paint the fireplace, a few simple well chosen things on the mantel, a computer desk with cabinets to hide cords and streamline everything, baskets for toys and knickknacks and baskets on the kitchen shelving to hide all that clutter. Or a freestanding enclosed piece of furniture.

And that's just the beginning.

MelissaR, thanks for the feedback and your reflections. Everyone who offered specific suggestions - thanks so much! I really like these ideas. I should run down Maureen's check list and see what we get. Putting in a roman shade, rearranging or replacing the art work, seeing if we can make a feature of the mantle, finding a few fun baskets, etc. are all things we can do right now and will make fun projects. We've got two adults working from home right now, and two kids of different ages at loose ends, so our bandwidth is a little limited. But these are things we can pull off immediately.

On the big picture questions ... I'll really have to think about this. We're new to the house (first year). In round one of our experiment, we tried organizing the downstairs into separate zones of activity, and that model has been working really well for us. We have a living room that is for reading, talking, and watching TV. There's a dining room. And there's the kitchen / family room area under discussion here, which is handling food prep and housing all the 'active kid' activities. There's a large fenced backyard, also visible from the kitchen, which functions like a fourth room. What we've noticed ... especially since the entire family has been working, playing, and schooling at home during Covid-19 ... is that family members are cycling through these spaces. No room is very big (everything is more or less 10' x 12') but they seem to be doing a fairly good job of absorbing and segregating different kinds of activities. So, I'm reluctant to mess with the functions of these zones too much. However, there are some trades that might be made.

One advantage of the multi-function room ... maybe ... is also that it is flexible. Right now, as in at this second, the kids have a lot of different things they are doing. If we don't lock ourselves into defining rigidly how the family room space has to be used, it can evolve down-the-line into being just the piano room or (if the kids decide the loathe piano) it can be just a game room or what-have-you. But whatever happens in there in 6 months / 6 years, if we don't push the kid activities into the living room and dining room, those can stay the more ordered and defined relaxation spaces.

Assuming we don't move the major elements right now (that is, the corner computer and the piano) -- does anyone have additional pointers for ways to visually unify the multi-function rooms? I get that visually a piano, computer, and (some days) a kid chair or a kid table in front of a fireplace is a lot to have going on. Maybe its a lost cause to tie that together, and the best thing we can do is to make sure all the little random objects are hidden away. But if there are some things we can try we might as well give them a spin. Would it help to pick a couple big pieces of artwork, or some other assemblage, that has a single color or theme?

I’d center the rug, then move the piano to the wall on the right of it. Keep desk where it is, and put a nice reading chair and ottoman with floor lamp just to the right of the window. That would really cozy up the area, and have a nice division between the desk and piano. It’d be a nice spot to listen to the piano playing, read to the kids, etc. It would unify the room, making it feel like more than just a work area.

I’d decorate the mantle different and keep toys in storage when not in use.

The piano should be on an interior wall for its health. Is it too long for the bathroom wall to its right? If piano lessons will happen at home, a more private location would be preferable. Ideally, the rug shouldn''t butt up against the hearth or any wall. Generally, a full room area rug should remain 12-18" from hearth or baseboards. Your mockup is better, but the rug should be wider than the hearth to look balanced.

The piano could flip to the wall on it's right. The distance from the window to the corner (where the piano lives now) is 62". That bit of wall to its right is 70" long.

Try flipping the piano to that other wall and then measure the distance from the hearth to the piano when the seat is pulled out and sat on. Subtract the 12-18" in front of the hearth and the space required for the piano when being played. That should give you some direction about the size of rug the room can handle.

Seems like a great space to have, especially while your kids are young. I echo the baskets advice; it could make a huge difference to have things corralled and hidden.

Please let us see as you make changes!

Figured it can't hurt to try decoenthusiest's and jinx's piano flip. Here's a few versions on that idea. My daughter is helping me:

With a big chair ...

With a big chair and a little table:

With just a small table and small sitting chair:

I like it with the larger chair. The smaller one doesn’t feel to scale to me.

The piano is so much better on this wall. Is there any room for a chair of the right side of the fireplace?

Ellen S, I can see what you mean about scale. The large wing chair between the corner computer and the piano seems to work because it has enough visual weight to kind of offset them. The small chair doesn't have the same heft.

I'm not sure if the little table+chairs can take on some heft if there's also a blind or curtain on the window to complement them? Probably not so much as the big chair.

Design Girl, ... well, there's room (physically speaking) to put chair(s) in front of the fireplace. Now what looks OK is another question.

For fun, here's different sizes of things using props from around the house. Unfortunately I don't have any pairs of things. I think the green wing chair is way too big for the fireplace area; the child or smaller adult chair size might work.

Small kid chair and small adult chair:

Green chair with comparison to kid chair - definitely too big I think. But maybe useful for comparison purposes:

I probably owe everyone an update to the thread. We're not done with the space yet. And as some folks pointed out, we probably under any circumstances have a little too much going on here in terms of function to have a totally "pulled together" look. But here's what we have now with a few of the ideas discussed upthread.

1. We flipped the piano.

2. We added a chair for sitting (currently experimenting with two chairs from other places in the house - we could use one of these, or buy a new chair)

3. We added pretty storage baskets for the kids' flotsam and jetsam.

4. I kept the rug - it seems to make things more comfortable for the kids, it seems to warm up the space, and it hooks into some of the other warm colors in the space.

5. We're not sure what do with the art / possible window treatment, but we're experimenting with the mantel and for now I tried pulling the existing art into a tighter grouping at least. (The kids added some summer artwork too - not permanent.)

Anyway, it's maybe not great, but I wanted to come back and say some of the suggestions made here seem to be offer some improvement and some steps in a direction. I think the baskets helped a lot! The room is perhaps a little busy, but I kind of like all the layered textures / repeating colors, and it feels cozier. For the kids, there's a lot of places to "go" in there - and they're spending a lot of time here thanks for school in our area being 100 percent virtual through at least January. It's really turning into the kids playroom / study, so maybe that's theme I need to keep trying to emphasize.

With chair / basket combo 1

With chair/basket combo 2

View from the other line of approach to that room:

Glad you found a solution--if you're happy with it that's all that matters!

I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to say solution. But it's been nice to muck around and see if we can improve on the current situation at least!

I like it! It makes the room seem bigger, too. Thanks for updating us. :)