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Guide

How to measure a wall for a mural

Five minutes with a tape measure. Get this right and the mural fits like it was painted on; get it wrong and you are paying for a reprint. This is the single most common cause of a bad mural order, and it is entirely avoidable.

What you need

A metal tape measure — not a cloth one, they stretch. A pencil. Someone to hold the other end if the wall is over eight feet wide. Work in inches, not feet and inches: “138” beats “11 ft 6 in” and removes a whole category of arithmetic mistakes.

The three measurements

width — measure at 3 heights, use the largest height — 3 points floor / skirting line
Walls are never square. Measure width at the top, middle and bottom, and height at the left, middle and right — then use the largest number from each.
  1. Width, three times. Measure corner to corner at the top of the wall, at roughly waist height, and just above the skirting board. Write all three down. Take the biggest.
  2. Height, three times. Measure floor to ceiling at the left edge, the middle and the right edge. If you are hanging above skirting, measure from the top of the skirting instead. Take the biggest.
  3. Add two inches to each. That is your trim allowance. We print to the larger size and you cut the excess off at the edges after hanging. Without it, a wall that is half an inch out leaves you with a white sliver in the corner and no way to fix it.
Send us the bigger number, always. You can trim material off. You cannot add it back on. Every professional installer over-orders on purpose.

Walls with things in them

Doors, windows, fireplaces and built-ins do not change how you measure — measure the full rectangle as if the obstruction were not there, then tell us where it sits. We lay the artwork out across the whole wall and you cut the openings after hanging. That way the design flows correctly around the gap instead of being squashed to fit beside it.

full wall width, ignore the window left edge → window window w × h measure the whole rectangle, then tell us where the opening sits
For each opening send four numbers: its width, its height, the distance from the left edge of the wall, and the distance from the ceiling.

Sloped ceilings and stairwells

Measure the tallest point and the shortest point, and the width at both. Then take a photo from across the room with the tape measure held against the wall — one photo saves twenty minutes of email. Stairwell walls are the one case where we would rather quote from a photo and a sketch than from numbers alone.

Textured walls

Run your hand over it. If you can feel orange peel, knockdown or a heavy roll texture, peel-and-stick will not adhere reliably and will telegraph the texture through the print. Either skim the wall smooth first or use prepasted non-woven, which is far more tolerant. Tell us before you order and we will point you at the right material.

A worked example

MeasurementReadingUse
Width — top / middle / bottom141.5" · 142" · 141.75"142"
Height — left / middle / right107" · 107.5" · 106.75"107.5"
Plus trim allowance+2" each way144" × 109.5"
Billable area144 × 109.5 ÷ 144110 sq ft

That wall in peel-and-stick at $5.50 is $605. The same wall ordered from the smallest reading instead of the largest would have arrived three-quarters of an inch short on the right — and there is no fixing that except printing it again.

Not sure? Send a photo. Take one straight-on photo of the wall with a tape measure held horizontally across it, and email it with your rough numbers. We will work the layout out from there and confirm before anything prints.

Send us your measurements   Next: how to hang it