Furniture to sort out before Diwali: a room-by-room plan

Diwali is the week a home is used hardest: more people sitting at once, a meal the whole family sits down to, relatives staying over and lamps on every surface. It is also the week most people decide the sofa is too small or the dining table seats two too few, which is usually too late to do much about it.

This is the order to deal with it in, and how to time it when the furniture is made to order rather than taken off a shelf.

Work back from the festival date

Our pieces are built in 4 to 7 days once the design is confirmed. That is the short part. The part that takes time is everything before it: measuring the room, choosing between two designs, settling the fabric and agreeing the size. Leave room for that, and agree delivery timing for your building when you confirm the order.

1. The living room: seating for the busiest evening

Count the people who sit down at once on the evening everyone visits. If that number is two more than your sofa holds, an extra chair is the obvious fix and rarely the right one: it blocks a walkway and nobody wants to sit on it. A corner sectional like the Meridian L-shape, or a modular piece like the Halden modular sectional, seats more people along the same walls.

Think about what the sofa will go through in festival week: sweets, chai, children in new clothes. A darker or patterned fabric forgives more than a pale plain one, and a design with removable covers can be cleaned without a visit from anyone. The fabric or leather guide covers how each copes with the Delhi NCR climate the rest of the year.

2. The dining table: one more chair than usual

A festival meal is the one time every chair is taken, so measure for that. Mark the table on the floor, then pull the chairs out to where people actually sit and check there is still room to walk behind them with a plate. A common rule of thumb is around 75 to 90 cm between the table edge and a wall or another piece of furniture.

In a squarer room, a round top takes an extra chair more easily than a square one; the Orbit dining set is built for exactly that. In a long room, a table built to the length the room allows, like the Atrium dining table, uses the space better than a standard size with a gap at one end.

3. The guest room: a bed that hides the extra bedding

Visiting family brings quilts, pillows and luggage that has to go somewhere. A storage bed like the Vault storage bed keeps all of it under the mattress, and keeps doing that the other fifty weeks of the year. Check the mattress size you already own before you choose the bed size; the bed buying guide goes through the rest.

4. The media wall: plan the sockets for the lights

The wall with the television is usually the one that gets the strings of lights, and the one with the fewest sockets in the right place. A wall-mounted unit with concealed cable routing, such as the Linea wall TV unit, can be laid out around the sockets you have, so the festival lighting does not mean extension leads across the floor.

Diyas, rangoli and your furniture

• Stand diyas on a tray, not on wood. Heat and oil both mark a timber or laminate top. A metal plate or a ceramic tile underneath costs nothing and saves the finish.
• Let wax set before you deal with it. A drip on fabric comes away far more cleanly once it has hardened than while it is still soft.
• Keep the entrance clear. If the rangoli is at the door, move anything that guests would have to step around, and keep furniture legs off the powder.

Check the way in before festival week

In a high-rise, the service lift decides what arrives in one piece; in a builder floor it is the turn in the staircase. Both are covered in the guides for Noida apartments and Ghaziabad builder floors. Ask your society about delivery hours too, because they are often busiest in the week before the festival.