Depreciation/recapture for renting a portion of our house

[Jim P.]

We're renting out a couple of rooms in our house. I've been calculating and claiming depreciation for a percent of the value of our house based on how many square feet are rented vs. the part we occupy. That part is complicated, but not too bad.

I'm just wondering if it's going to be really complicated when we eventually sell the house. Is it going to be complicated for us or the IRS to calculate the recapture amount. I mean, some years we rented out one room, some years it was two rooms. So the percent of the house rented varies from 0% to 50% depending on the year. And there were a few years when I accidentally depreciated 100% of the house as if it was all rented (oops).

How does that all get computed to figure the recapture amount when we sell it? Do they just look at the actual dollar amount of the total depreciation that we claimed?