Measuring A Hip Roof

Use a ladder to carefully climb onto the roof.

Measuring a hip roof.

Measuring an existing roof 1. The roof area for a hip end is the same as for a gable end the intersection is equivalent to a hip slightly conservative so there is usually no need to consider triangles when measuring a roof. The top ridge will be shorter than the one of the gable roof but the four hips will add to the ridge length. Set up a ladder to allow access to the roof making sure that the feet of the ladder are resting on firm ground.

For example you might need a hip roof framing calculator to work out the depth and the range of the frame that is to go up to make sure everything can be cut and prepared to the right size. Set up your ladder beneath one of the roof s hips or sloped faces. The only difference in this calculation to the one for a gable roof area is the amount of the ridge. A hip roof s square footage is equal to that of a gable roof with the same dimensions.

Climb up to the roof and measure each face of the hip roof. The hip style roof is in blue and the gable style roof is in red. The roof area is simply 114x18x2 plus 30x18x2 giving 5184 square feet which is perfectly adequate for estimating materials. The top ridge will be shorter for a hip roof but the 4 hips will add to the amount of ridge capping needed and because of the angles the amount of waste will be higher than for a similar sized gable roof.

X expert source david bitan. Remember it doesn t have to be to scale or look pretty. Select the style that best matches your project and move on to step 1. The difference is in the amount of ridge capping you need and the amount you will waste.

Roughly draw out your roof on a piece of paper. How to measure for hip roofing step 1. Find the dimensions of each of the roof s faces. For parallelogram shaped faces measure the length.

Getting things like the area and the angles right is going to be so important to doing this kind of job right. It does have to contain all the straight lines of your roof and an accurate measurement of.