How To Measure A Rectangular Or Square Room

Why You Need Accurate Flooring Measurement

Without knowing how much flooring you need; you cannot come up with the budget estimation of the project. Besides, to avoid any inconvenience you may encounter during reordering flooring materials, you should order enough material with a little excess.

Just imagine that you find in the middle project that not enough material is not ordered, what happens? First, you will have to plan the project budget again or find new financing for the project. Second, you may have to stop the project and wait until the new material arrives. This will cause unwanted delays in the project. Third, because many dealers don’t accept the cost of transportation or shipping you may have to incur additional shipping or transportation. Not to mention the possibility of getting into trouble with the dealer and the difficulty of matching the colour and pattern of the new material with the old one.

On the other hand, you don’t want to order excess material. That’s a waste of money. Even if the manufacturer agrees to buy it back (many manufacturers don’t) they will put the cost of shipment on you. So, you can see how important accurate measurement of flooring is.

The Tools You’ll Need

For measuring your room for vinyl or laminate flooring you’ll need:

Tape measure or Laser distance measure

A Pen

A piece of paper or (preferably) a notebook to write the measurements.

Calculator or you can use your mobile phone’s calculator.

If you are using a tape measure, you may need someone to hold the other side of the measure.

How To Measure A Rectangular Or Square Room

Step 1: Measure and Multiply

When it comes to measuring flooring for laminate or vinyl nothing is easier than measuring a square or rectangular room. First, use your measuring tape or laser equipment to take measurements of room length and breadth, then multiply these numbers to get your square footage. Don’t forget to write the measurements in a notebook or save them on your so that you can find them later without difficulty. Because a piece of paper can be displaced easily, you’d better use a notebook for recording measurements.

Step 2: Add extra material

Now that you have the measurements and square footage in a notebook, you should add 10% to the square footage to get the amount of material you’re going to order. This extra 10% is to compensate for cuts, wastes and staggering.  In the case of laminate or vinyl flooring, this is very important, because the flooring needs to be staggered during installation. After all, you don’t want the headache of reordering flooring materials and project stalls due to material shortage.

Example:

Suppose that you want to order laminate flooring for a rectangular room, if your room is 6 metres long and 3 metres wide, the area will be 18 metres square because 6 x 3 = 18. But you need to add 10% to this number to accommodate cuts and wastes. That is 18×1.1=19.8. So, you need to order about 20 square meters of flooring material.