How To Measure Your Room Correctly for That Next DIY Project

DIY can be a fun and productive way of upgrading a house or living area without the expense of hiring tradespeople to do it for you. However, sometimes over-eagerness can get the better of us and what should be a simple job often goes awry due to lack of preparation. 

With a little forethought, a DIY project can be a gratifying creative outlet with practical applications. Here, we show you how to measure a room correctly, so you needn’t have any awkward moments on your next DIY undertaking.

Paper and Preparation

As with almost everything in life, being organised is key. By making sure you have the basic groundwork in place before even starting, you can make great strides rapidly and efficiently and have something to refer to when unsure. 

The first thing you’ll want to do is get a piece of paper and sketch out a rough outline of the room in which you are doing the DIY. In the process, you’ll want to mark where windows and doors are and the direction in which they open, so you know they won’t knock into another item when in use. It’s no good measuring up a room to fit a sideboard into a given space only to find you can’t open the doors properly. If you have arches or coves, you’ll want to make a note of them too.

Keep It Clear

You don’t have to produce a great work of art; you just have to have an understandable diagram where the measurements are clearly marked. This is the most important aspect of your diagram as it’s all about how things will fit together. 

Once you’ve done this floorplan sketch, you’ll want to make a separate sketch of each wall with any fixed items included. This means things like windows, wall sockets, air vents, built-in wardrobes etc. should all be part of the image. You’ll have to work around these so getting their placement at least roughly right is highly important.

From here, you’ll want to add dimensions to your sketches. Measure the room from a fixed point to a fixed point i.e., a corner to the window, or corner to corner if there is nothing in the way. For fixed objects, you’ll want to measure their size and record their position, making note of their dimensions as you go along and making sure you map the whole space.

Make Sure You Don’t Miss a Thing

If you pick a starting point to work from and then move around the room clockwise from there, you are far less likely to miss anything else and it gives you a nice clear structure of what you should work on next.

Measure any large items in the room and include the gaps between them to avoid any awkward fits or doors opening into walls. Once everything has been measured up and made a note of, you should be good to go.

If you’ve undertaken a DIY project and want some furniture to go with it, or just can’t deal with the hassle of building your own items, check out our collections of furniture here.