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RugFrameTerrace

Measurement 1 of 4

Measure the Floor

Two numbers for the room and two numbers for the furniture. The room numbers set the largest rug that can go down; the furniture numbers set the smallest rug worth buying.

What you need in your hand

  • A 25 ft tape measure. A 12 ft tape will not cross most living rooms and joining two readings introduces error you cannot see.
  • A pencil and paper. Not a phone — you will be crouching.
  • Painter’s tape, if you want to mark the rug outline on the floor before ordering.

3 items.

The steps

6 of them, in order.

  1. Measure wall to wall, twice

    Run the tape along the floor from baseboard to baseboard in one direction, then the other. Take the reading at the baseboard, not at the wall above it, because the baseboard is what the rug edge will actually meet. Write both numbers in inches.

  2. Measure again in a second place

    Rooms are not rectangles. Take the same two spans a few feet away from where you took them first. If the two readings differ by more than an inch, use the smaller one — a rug cut to the larger number will not lie flat at the narrow end.

  1. Mark what cannot be covered

    Note the swing of every door into the room and the clearance under it. Note where a heating vent sits in the floor. Note the run of any floor-level cable. These are subtractions from the usable area, and they are the reason a rug that fits on paper does not fit in the room.

  2. Measure the seating footprint

    Put the tape across the outer edge of the furniture group: the outside of one sofa arm to the outside of the chair opposite, then front to back the same way. This rectangle, not the room, is what the rug has to relate to.

  3. Measure the walking lanes

    Stand where you enter the room and walk your usual line through it. Measure the width of that lane, typically 30 to 36 in. A rug edge that lands in the middle of it is the edge that gets caught, so plan the rug to either clear the lane or cross it fully.

  1. Do the subtraction on paper

    Take 18 in off each of the two opposing walls from your room numbers. Add 8 to 12 in per side to your seating footprint. You now have a maximum and a minimum. Any rug size between them works; if the minimum is bigger than the maximum, the furniture is too big for the room.

Where it goes wrong

3 mistakes that account for most of the returns.

Measuring the room and stopping there.
The room number tells you the biggest rug that fits. It says nothing about whether the furniture will sit on it, which is the part people actually notice.
Measuring in feet and rounding.
A room measured as "about 12 by 15" is anywhere from 141 to 186 in. That range spans two rug sizes.
Forgetting the door swing.
A rug that a door catches on is a rug that gets pushed into a ridge every time somebody comes in, and the ridge is a trip hazard.

Sources for this page

3 sources, checked by opening each one.