Include title length in excerpt length?

Hey guys. I’m working on a front page with post excerpts and for the design to work out I need exact box heights. I’ve set a maximum character length to the excerpts (along with fixed thumbnail size).
However, I can’t find a way to include the length of the title into this fixed amount of characters, and I don’t really like the idea of having fixed box heights (and try to “figure out” approx. how much space each box needs…)
When the title of the post is on one line only, the boxes obviously become shorter. At the moment I have a fixed height on the header part and vertical aligned headers, but I’m not to fond of the random spacing.
Any ideas or workarounds would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!