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RugFrameTerrace

Measurement 3 of 4

Measure the Wall

The rectangle of wall that is actually available once the furniture, the trim and the switches are taken out of it — which is always smaller than the wall.

What you need in your hand

  • A steel tape and a pencil.
  • A spirit level, for checking whether the floor under the wall is level before you decide where anything sits.
  • Painter’s tape, to mark the outline of the object on the wall at full size before committing.

3 items.

The steps

5 of them, in order.

  1. Measure the full wall, corner to corner

    Take the width at the top and again at the bottom. Take the height at both ends. Write down four numbers. If they disagree, the smaller of each pair is the one to work with.

  2. Subtract what is already there

    Baseboard, crown molding, a light switch, a thermostat, an outlet, the arc of a door. Mark each one on your sketch with its distance from the nearest corner and from the floor. What is left is the clear rectangle.

  3. Measure the furniture below

    For anything hung above a sofa or a console, the height of that furniture is the datum, not the floor. Measure to the top of the back rail. A sofa back is commonly around 30 to 34 in, and the arithmetic for shelf height starts from that number.

  1. Mark the reach limits

    Stand at the wall and mark, in pencil, the highest point you can comfortably take a full glass down from with both feet on the floor. For most adults that is somewhere between 68 and 74 in. Nothing that has to be used goes above that mark.

  2. Tape out the object at full size

    Put painter’s tape on the wall in the exact rectangle of the thing you are considering — 56 by 21 in for a mirror, or three 15.7 in shelves at your chosen spacing. Leave it up for a day. This step catches more errors than any of the measuring ones.

Where it goes wrong

3 mistakes that account for most of the returns.

Measuring the wall and not the clear rectangle.
The mirror fits the wall and lands on the light switch, or the shelf run stops two inches into the door swing.
Measuring shelf height from the floor when there is a sofa under it.
The lowest shelf ends up either resting on the sofa back or floating so far above it that the two do not read as related.
Skipping the tape-out.
Fifty-six inches sounds modest on a listing and looks enormous on a wall. Twenty minutes of painter’s tape settles it.

Sources for this page

3 sources, checked by opening each one.