On 3/2/2011 10:16 PM Mike Paulsen spake thus:

David Nebenzahl wrote:

Alright, so this is Carpentry 101, but I'm gonna ask it anyhow.

Question concerns taking measurements where there is an inside corner:
how do you do it accurately? F'rinstance, say you're sheeting the inside
of a closet and are measuring the wall height from floor to ceiling. You
put the bottom of your tape against the floor, climb up on your
stepstool or whatever, then wrap your tape around the top corner of the
wall. What then?

I mean, it's really hard to know just what exactly the actual height is.
It *looks* like 93 5/8--no, make that 11/16--maybe 3/4--WTF?

It almost makes me want to build myself a little "story pole", two long
sticks grooved together with a little clamp to take exact inside
measurements. (I think a sliding dovetail would work nicely here.)

How do you handle this? How did carpenters do this in the olden days?
What tricks do you use? How many times do you just cut a piece oversize,
then trim to fit?

Run the tape from floor to ceiling. Make your best guess at the total
length. Now put a mark 24" down from the ceiling. Measure up from the
floor to the mark. add 24". Compare the actual result to your estimate.
Learn to estimate accurately.

I like that; brain training. Will do.

But why are you concerned with running sheeting all the way to the
floor? You _want_ to leave it shy of the floor a bit, and baseboard will
cover the gap.

Just an example. A better example would have been cutting studs to fit
tightly betwixt floor and ceiling. Point is that it's good to know the
actual height instead of just guesstimating it.


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