Влезет ли диван? Как проверить iPhone-ом до покупки

Every furniture shop has the same return rate: about 4% of sofas come back because they don't fit through the buyer's front door. Most of those returns could be prevented with five minutes of measurement before the purchase. Here's the checklist, and how to capture it with your iPhone.

The four measurements that matter

A sofa has to navigate four pinch points between the truck and your living room:

1. Front door opening, width and height
2. Hallway turning radius, the tightest corner the sofa has to round
3. Stairwell clearance (if you're not on the ground floor)
4. Final room footprint, where the sofa will sit, relative to existing furniture

1. Front door

Stand in the doorway. Open Ruler AR (or any AR measuring app), select length mode, and tap the inside of one door jamb, then the other. That's your door's clear width, the actual passable dimension, not the frame-to-frame width.

Repeat top-to-bottom for door height. A standard interior door is 80 cm × 200 cm but vintage homes and apartment doors vary wildly. Sofas wider than your clear width need to come in on their side or upright.

2. Hallway turning radius

If the front door opens straight into a hallway, the sofa needs to turn. Measure the corridor width at the turn (point your phone across the corridor and tap each wall). Then measure the corner depth, from the corner of the wall to the opposite parallel wall.

The rule of thumb: your sofa's diagonal (length × depth via Pythagoras) must be less than the corridor width plus the corner depth. The app's area tool lets you draw the corner footprint as a polygon and read the diagonal directly.

3. Stairwell clearance

Stairwell measurement is where AR really earns its keep. Hold the phone perpendicular to the stairs, midway up, and use the Height tool to capture vertical clearance. Then horizontal width at the same point. Repeat at the top of the flight where the ceiling can angle inward.

Spiral stairs and tight L-shaped landings are the killer here. The Manual Room Builder can capture the landing footprint in 30 seconds, sketch the polygon by tapping corners and use the area tool to verify the diagonal.

4. Room footprint

Walk into the destination room. Note where the sofa is going. Measure the wall length where it'll sit, then the clearance from the wall to any existing furniture, doorways, or radiators. Most sofas need 15-30 cm of breathing room on the back if it's near a vent or radiator.

Save these as a single project in the app. The PDF export turns the whole set into one document you can show the salesperson at IKEA or whichever store, "this is my space, what fits?"

The numbers you actually need to bring to the showroom

• Door clear width and height
• Corridor width at turn × corner depth
• Stairwell width × ceiling height (if applicable)
• Destination wall length

Compare each to the sofa's shipping dimensions, not just its "in-use" dimensions. A sofa packed for shipping is often 5-10 cm wider and taller than the final assembled product due to the box and protective wrapping. Some sofas come with detachable legs and arms, those measurements are usually published as "in-room" and "packaged" on the manufacturer's website.

What about modular and L-shaped sofas?

Modular sofas ship in separate pieces, each of which has to fit through individually. Measure each piece against your bottleneck (the smallest opening). L-shaped sofas usually ship in two parts, chaise and main section, and the larger of the two is what you compare to the door.

Bookmark the measurements

The PDF export from Ruler AR includes a 2D floor plan with dimensions labeled. Send it to your partner. Save the project. When you find a sofa you like, open the PDF, compare each shipping dimension to your bottleneck, and either commit, or keep looking. Two minutes that prevent a 30-minute return trip and a restocking fee.