When you want to install new flooring, you should know how much flooring you should order. For that, you need an accurate measurement of the room. If you underestimate or over calculate the flooring material required, you will waste your hard-earned renovation funding or encounter unwanted costs and procrastination as the flooring project goes on.
In the case that you didn’t order enough material for flooring, if you are lucky and can find the matching tiles, you may have to accept the inconvenience for the reordering flooring packs. Besides, you may incur the charges for shipping and transportation again.
On other hand, you don’t want to spend the money saved for your house remodelling on the excess flooring boards with no usage. Even if the retailer agrees to buy them back, they will put the shipment costs on you.
Tools That You May Need For Floor Measurement?
– Laser Distance Measure or Tape Measure
– A Notebook to Record Dimensions (You can use your phone notes instead)
– If you are using a tape measure, you need someone to help you to hold the other side of the tape measure.
– A Calculator or you can use the Calculator app on your phone.
Step 1: Measure And Record Your Flooring
First of all, you need to determine the shape of the room. if the room is square or rectangular, you have an easy job. Simply measure the length and width of the space and multiply to get the square footage. Let’s say, you found that the room to be floored is 12 ft length and 10 ft width. Then the square footage of the room will be 120 Square Feet. But it’s not the final size of flooring material you should order, stay tuned to find out why.
If the flooring is not rectangular but it’s possible to divide it into rectangular regions, to calculate the flooring area, you need to first divide the space into regular rectangles/squares. Next, you’ll be able to measure length and width of each region and sum them up to get the total square footage of flooring. It’s better to use a notebook to draw a sketch of the room so that you can figure out how to break the complex shape to simple shape. As you measure each side, record dimensions of the region next to the room drawing. Later, you can use these numbers to estimate the area of the whole room.
Calculating the flooring required for non-rectangular spaces is not so simple. First, you have to examine the shape of flooring closely. Next, estimate the area of the room with the help of the area geometric formula. For example, suppose that you have a dining room with a circle shape. To find the square footage of flooring, multiply 3.14 to the room diameter two times and divide by 4.
Step 2: Account For Waste
You should add a certain percentage to your flooring order to accommodate for wastes and errors. The wastes come in different types during installation from an imperfect match between tile patterns to the corner and angle cuts as well as errors and breakage. When you hire a professional for flooring you can expect an extremely small amount of waste. However, if you’re planning on DIY Flooring Installation, you should include an extra 5 percent waste.
Typically, you need to consider 10-15% extra flooring to compensate for wastes and errors. For rooms shapes other than rectangles, the waste percent could be as high as 20%, based on the shape of the flooring.
Step 3: Calculate Number Of Flooring Pack You Need
Once you have measured the flooring accurately and taken into account an excess for wastes, it’s time to place your order for flooring material. Although you can calculate the number of packs/tiles needed yourself dividing flooring area by that of every pack, it’s better to ask the retailer to weight up the number of packs and costs. They’re always there to help you and know their products better than anyone else.
In this post, we gave you top hints for how to measure a flooring accurately and though, waste less money on flooring in addition to avoiding inconvenience during the installation process.
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