How to Measure Your Space

Almost every veranda quote begins with three numbers — a width, a projection and a height — and a good proportion of enquiries arrive with either none of them or with figures taken from the wrong places. That is not a criticism of anyone. Nobody has reason to know which face of a wall a projection is measured from until the week they need to. But those three figures set the size of the structure, the shape of the price, and occasionally whether the thing can be built on that elevation at all, so twenty minutes with a tape measure is time well spent.

At Roma Verandas nothing is ordered from a customer's own measurements, so none of what follows has to be perfect. What your figures do is let us quote something realistic and spot the awkward parts of a job while they are still cheap to solve. This guide covers what to measure, where to measure from, what to look at on the ground and along the roofline, and why the numbers you take are for quoting rather than for manufacturing.

Width: The Run Along the Wall

Width is the dimension running sideways along the house. What you want is the clear, uninterrupted run of wall the veranda could occupy — from whatever stops it at one end to whatever stops it at the other. The stopper is usually an external corner, but it might equally be a conservatory, a bay, a garage return, a rainwater downpipe that cannot be moved, or a fence line the structure must not cross. Measure that run against the wall itself at waist height rather than along the front edge of the patio, because patio edges wander and walls do not.

Then record where things sit within that run, always measured from one fixed end rather than from each other. The distance from the left-hand corner to the near edge of the patio doors, and the width of the doors themselves, do the most work, because a veranda is set out around the doors rather than centred on the wall. If you are working to a hard limit — a fence, a path, a manhole — measure the limit and tell us what it is rather than working back to a frame size yourself.

Where the available run is tight, the width of the framing starts to matter in its own right. On a side return or a narrow gap between the house and a boundary wall, a slim-profile system such as the Nebbiolo buys back usable centimetres at each side, which is not only a question of how it looks. On a five-metre wall that difference is invisible. On a two-and-a-half-metre one it can decide whether a chair fits.

Projection: How Far the Roof Comes Out

Projection is the depth of the structure out from the house. Measure it from the face of the wall the veranda will fix to — the actual brick or render face — not from the door frame, the outside edge of a sill, or the lip of a threshold, all of which sit forward of the wall by anything from twenty to a hundred millimetres. Take it out to the point where the covered area genuinely needs to end: the edge of the patio, the start of the lawn, or the line beyond which you would rather not have posts.

Check what is at that front line, because that is where the posts will land. Paving that looks continuous often ends in a thin edging course bedded on soil, which no post base can sit on without proper foundation work beneath it. A gully, a manhole cover or an inspection chamber in the post position is a real constraint rather than a detail, far better identified now than on installation day. Look upwards too: a soffit oversailing by two or three hundred millimetres, a first-floor window or an overhanging tree all sit in the space the roof wants.

Height at the Wall, and Why It Decides Most Things

Height is the measurement that most often determines whether a design works. Measure from patio level up to the underside of the soffit, or to the lowest fixed obstruction in the band of wall the veranda needs — the bottom of a bargeboard, the underside of a windowsill, the top of a meter box. Take that reading tight against the wall, and take it again at each end of the run, because eaves are not always level and patios rarely are. The difference between the two ends tells you as much as either figure alone.

It governs so much because a veranda is a lean-to. The roof falls away from the house, so the highest point of the structure is the wall profile, and that profile needs sound, clear masonry to fix into. Domestic pitches usually sit between five and fourteen degrees. At nine degrees the roof rises roughly 157 millimetres per metre of projection, so a three-metre veranda climbs about 470 millimetres from the front beam back to the wall. Add the depth of the beam and gutter, and a workable clear height beneath it of around 2.2 to 2.5 metres, and the fixing height at the wall is approaching three metres.

If your measured height falls short of that the design is not dead; it simply moves into a different category, and the honest options are a shallower pitch, a flat-roof system, brackets that step the fixing up and out, or a freestanding frame that ignores the wall. Record the head height of the patio doors too, typically a little over two metres, and the cill height of any first-floor window. A beam crossing the middle of a window is structurally unremarkable and visually hard to live with.

The Ground You Are Measuring From

Patios are laid to fall away from the house so rainwater leaves rather than sits, and a correctly laid one drops by something in the order of one in sixty to one in eighty — roughly twelve to seventeen millimetres per metre. Over a three-metre projection that is forty to fifty millimetres between the wall and the front posts. Check it with a spirit level and a tape: rest the level on the paving, raise the low end until the bubble centres, and measure the gap underneath. Note which way the fall runs, because on plenty of patios it runs sideways as well as outwards.

That figure matters because the posts are cut to different lengths to keep the roof line true, and because any sliding side element added later needs a genuinely level track. Note what the patio actually is, too — slabs on sand, slabs on concrete, block paving, decking, gravel. Then measure out to the boundaries, since a structure close to a fence is more restricted under permitted development, and your local planning authority is the right place to confirm what applies to your plot.

Photographs Do More Work Than the Numbers

If you send one thing, send a straight-on photograph of the whole elevation, taken from far enough back that both the ground and the roofline sit in the same frame. That single image tells us more than any list of dimensions, because it shows the doors, the windows, the eaves and the patio in relation to each other. Landscape orientation, square to the wall, on a day when the light is not directly behind the house.

Then add a view along the wall from each end, showing the eaves overhang and any pipework in profile, plus close-ups of anything fixed to the wall — a soil pipe, a boiler flue, an outside tap, a heat pump, a vehicle charger. Holding a tape against those items in the shot saves a conversation later. Remember that phone cameras use wide lenses which bend straight lines and exaggerate depth, so photographs support measurements rather than replace them.

Numbers for a Quote, Not for a Factory

Nothing is manufactured from figures a customer has taken, and that is no comment on anyone's tape work. A frame is cut to tolerances of a few millimetres and the glass is ordered to the frame, so the governing measurements are taken at survey by someone who has also checked whether the wall is plumb, what the brickwork is made of, where the damp-proof course sits and whether the patio edge is standing on anything. Those things quietly change a dimension, and none of them show up in a photograph.

What your own measurements buy you is an honest starting point: a quote that reflects your space rather than an average one, and an early warning if the projection you have in mind is more than that elevation will take. If you are unsure which of the awkward details on your back wall actually matter, send the figures and the photographs and we will tell you plainly what we think before anyone comes out. That is a far better conversation to have at the beginning than at the point where something has already been made.