How to measure a kitchen for cabinets

Nobody loses a kitchen on the big numbers. The wall is 148″ and it was 148″ when you got back.

What costs you is the outlet nobody wrote down, the ceiling that drops an inch over the fridge, and the window measured to the glass instead of the trim. Those turn into a second trip, or worse, a part.

So take the room in an order, every time, and take the same things in that order.

## Walk the room, do not hop around it

Start in a corner and go clockwise, wall by wall, in the order your feet take them. Finish each wall completely before you move to the next one.

That sounds fussy and it is the whole trick. A room measured in walking order can be drawn from the notes by somebody who was not there. A room measured by jumping to whatever looked interesting cannot.

For each wall, in this order:

1. The length — inside face to inside face, at 36″ off the floor. Walls are not plumb, so the number depends on the height you take it at. Take every wall at the same height and they can be compared. 2. The turn to the next wall. Ninety degrees unless it is not, and it is worth two seconds to check rather than assume. 3. The openings on that wall — doors, windows, pass-throughs. 4. The services on that wall — anything the cabinets have to dodge.

## Openings: the casing, not the glass

Measure the outside of the casing, both width and height. That is the obstruction a cabinet has to clear. The glass is not.

Then the two numbers people leave off:

- How far from the corner you walked from to the near edge of the opening. Without it the opening has a size but no place on the wall. - The sill height off the floor for a window. Zero for a door.

Put the swing direction in the note while you are standing in front of it. And whether the casing has to be matched — that is a shop decision made from a photo three weeks later if you do not write it now.

## Services: the ones that show up at install

Every wall gets its own list, and every item gets a distance from the corner you walked from plus a height off the floor:

- outlets and switches - plumbing rough-ins - vents and ducting - gas - soffits, and anything else structural

An outlet you did not record is a hole cut on site with a jigsaw and an audience.

## The four people forget

Ceiling height, at its lowest point. Not an average. If you are running crown or a soffit, the low spot is the number that governs — the rest of the ceiling gets shimmed to it.

Both diagonals, corner to corner. Two numbers, thirty seconds, and they tell you whether the room is square. When they disagree, the run needs a scribe, and you would rather know now than with the boxes hanging.

The floor's high point. Bases get shimmed up to it, so it sets the counter height for the whole run.

Which ends are finished. An applied end that shows up as a surprise is a sheet of matching ply you did not order.

Walls lie. A filler with ¾″ of scribe planned from the start installs in minutes; a run designed tight to the drywall installs with a grinder and regret. Put the filler in the design, not in the truck.

## Never guess. Write what you measured.

The rule the field measure form is built around is that a dimension is either measured or it is not there. There is no "about 34".

Type the fraction the way you read it off the tape — 34 1/2, 34-1/2 or 34.5 all work. It is snapped to 1/32″ for the model, and your keystrokes are kept verbatim alongside it, so the next person can see what you actually read.

A guess that gets typed like a measurement stops looking like a guess about ten minutes later. Then it becomes a part.

## Write it once, in the job

A dimension that lives on a sticky note dies in the truck. The form runs in the phone in your pocket with no install and no account, and it saves on the device as you type — you do not need signal once the page is open.

When you are done you download one file, and the desktop app reads it. You can also print a summary to leave with the client, which is a good look for the price of a page.

One thing worth knowing: the import is one-directional and lands as a new room. It is a way to get the room in, not a way to sync a room you have already been working on.

From there, the Draftsman can draft the layout to about 80% and flag the calls it is not willing to make for you.

That one is the paid part — it runs on cloud GPUs, so it costs prepaid credits, from about $3 a room. Everything else above is free and runs on your own machine.

## Questions