How to (properly!) measure your home before furniture shopping

All excited to start furnishing your dream home? Before you go furniture shopping, make sure you measure your home properly, so that you won’t have any headaches during the moving in process. The worst thing that could possibly happen is for you to purchase your dream couch, only to realise that it can’t get through your front door. Trust us, this has happened to first time owners before!

Measuring points of entries and passages

• Measure the width, height, and diagonal width of your lift. Older HDB blocks generally have smaller lifts; also, if your unit is not on a floor with a lift landing, you’ll have to budget more if you’re hiring movers.
  
• Measure the width, height, and diagonal width of your front door, entry points and passages.
• If you need to pass through any staircases (eg if you’re buying furniture for your bedroom on the second floor), measure the width, height, and diagonal width of said staircase as well.
• If there are any light fixtures or other low-hanging fixtures that might obstruct the moving in process, take them down. If they’re not easily removable, make a note and take this into consideration when you measure your home!

Measuring your rooms

• Like the above, measure the width, height and diagonal width of the door to your room
• Take note of which way your door swings – if it swings inward, this limits the amount of space you have to work with, and you’ll have to plan accordingly
• Measure the length and width of your room, as well as the height of your room
• Measure your windows and all other architectural features (such as any built-in nooks) – this is so that you have a point of reference to visualize how certain pieces of furniture will look against these features
• Measure the height from the floor to your windows, for the same purpose

When buying furniture

• Don’t buy furniture that have the same exact measurements that your front door and passages do. You need a buffer of at least 3-4 inches, to stay on the safe side!
• Check whether the legs of your sofas and desks can be removed – don’t just assume that this is the case!
• Check whether your mattress is bendable and has some give, or whether it’s completely rigid and inflexible

An app that can help measure your home

MagicPlan (available on iOS and Android)

(Credits)

The premise is simple – you start off by placing your phone on a flat surface to calibrate it, then take pictures of where the wall meets the floor, where it meets the ceiling, as well as the corners in your room. Presto, you get a floorplan, complete with measurements!

If the measurements seem off, you can tap into each measurement to further calibrate it – this is done by inputting your height (which affects the angle at which you’re holding your phone and taking pictures), and so on. However, in our experience trying MagicPlan, the measurements provided by the app differed by 30-40cm from our room’s actual measurements – even after calibration.

Our take? The steps you’ll need to take to measure your room isn’t something that requires a ton of time or effort – so we’d rather do it the old-school way and ensure that our measurements are right!

Got your measurements all done, and wondering where you should shop (apart from the no-brainer option, IKEA)? Check out some of our recommendations here!