Room Measuring Worksheet

What is on the sheet

Four sections, in the order you actually work through a room.

• A sketch grid at quarter-inch squares. Draw the room roughly to scale, then chop it into rectangles with straight lines and number them. An L-shape is two rectangles; a room with a chimney breast is one big rectangle minus a small one.
• A floor area table, one row per rectangle, with a total at the bottom. This is the part that makes an odd-shaped room straightforward — two measurements and an addition beat one measurement and a guess.
• Walls and perimeter, with two boxes for ceiling height. Measure it in opposite corners; if they differ by more than an inch, use the larger and expect to scribe.
• An openings list for doors and windows, with the deduction rule printed underneath so you do not have to remember it.

Why three numbers, not one

A room has three completely different measurements and they are not interchangeable. Floor area for flooring, tile and carpet. Wall area — perimeter times ceiling height — for drywall, paint and wallpaper. Perimeter in linear feet for baseboard and crown molding.

A 12 by 14 ft room with 8 ft ceilings has 168 sq ft of floor, 416 sq ft of wall, and 52 linear feet of trim. Three shopping lists from one visit to the room. The sheet has a box for all three because the expensive mistake is walking out with only the one you thought you needed.

How to use it

1. Print it and take it into the room with a steel tape. Measure at floor level, against the baseboard — walls bow, and the floor is where the flooring goes.
2. Sketch first, then measure. Having the shape on paper stops you measuring the same wall twice and missing the alcove entirely.
3. Write feet and inches exactly as you read them. Convert to decimals once, at the end, or let the calculator do it — every tool on this site takes feet and inches separately.
4. Photograph the finished sheet. This is the step people skip and regret. When you are standing in front of a rack of flooring trying to remember whether the back bedroom was 11 ft or 12, that photo is worth more than the tape measure.

Then what

Put the numbers into whichever calculator matches what you are buying and it will give you the count — bags, sheets, boxes, boards — rather than a square footage you still have to divide by something.