One of the worst feelings in the world is looking around at your flooring project with a sinking sensation and realizing that you’ve run short on your materials. If there aren’t enough tiles or planks to finish the room and you’ve already laid out 75%, you may feel like your amazing DIY project is crashing down around you. You hurriedly boot up your computer and pull up the website, hoping to place another order.
Best case scenario: you have to wait a few days or weeks for your extra flooring to be delivered and then acclimated to the environment to absorb any excess moisture. Worst case scenario? The manufacturer has run out of your flooring, and everything they have won’t match. What then?
All of this could easily be avoided by properly measuring your home before embarking on a big flooring project. Not sure how to measure like a pro? Not to worry! Hardwood Bargains has some simple steps to follow to ensure that you purchase enough flooring to account for every room you plan to cover.
How to Measure Your Flooring
Understanding how to measure your flooring is essential, whether you’re planning to DIY your floors or hire a contractor to do the laying. Regardless of what kind of floors you’re planning on using, you’ll be responsible for buying the materials beforehand, and you want to ensure that you have the right amount.
Step One
The first step is to determine the square footage of the room or rooms where you’re planning to lay your flooring. Don’t play guessing games with your flooring! Take out your measuring tape and figure out the exact dimensions of each room. Simply multiply your length by your width to find the total square footage.
This part may be trickier if your room isn’t shaped like a conventional rectangle. Although uncommon in modern homes, houses that are being restored to their former glory from prior to the 1940s may have rooms that feature unusual shapes. The hardest shape to account for is a circular room, but those are fairly rare.
When measuring a room, try and break it down into squares or rectangles. If you have to cordon off parts of the room to make it easier, go ahead. Just make sure you measure every area and add it all up at the end for a total.
Circles and Triangles
In some rare cases, there is no getting around a circular or triangular space. When measuring a triangular area, multiply your length and width, as you would do with a square room, then divide the total in half. Remember, triangles are just halves of squares.
Circles are trickier. For those of you who don’t remember eighth-grade geometry very well, finding the area of a circle means multiplying the radius squared by pi. To break that down, measure from wall to wall of your circular room. That’s the diameter. Divide that by two for the radius. Multiply the radius by itself. (or square it). Then multiply that number by pi, which is 3.14. Voila!
Step Two
You’re not done yet, though. Figure out ten to fifteen percent of your room’s square footage and then add that as extra on top of your square footage. That extra flooring can really save your caboose if something goes wrong and you need some extra flooring to cover a mistake or because you accidentally cut another plank in the wrong shape.
During this step, you should also consider anything that might stop you from laying flooring. For example, a kitchen island or a toilet that is bolted to the floor. Anything that you know you won’t be moving or laying the floor under will count as a deduction for the flooring you need to purchase.
Step Three
This may be the most difficult step, but it involves accounting for transition pieces and molding. We’re not talking about moldy wood here! Depending on the size of the room, you may need to purchase transition pieces to help the continuity of your floor.
For example, if your room is over 40 feet long, like a kitchen and dining room combination might be, you’ll probably need a transition piece to delineate the rooms without a wall.
You should also keep in mind that your floors won’t actually be touching the walls of the room when you lay them. This is less important if you’re planning on hiring a contractor to install your flooring, but for intrepid DIYers out there, this is essential.
Understanding Wood Movement
Wood naturally expands and contracts as the humidity levels in a room change. You may not even notice it, but your floors certainly know the difference between a hot, humid summer and a cold, dry winter—wood contracts when it’s dry and expands with moisture.
Most people try to prevent excess moisture from seeping into their floors by using protection underneath the flooring like underlayment, but there is only so much that you can do for the air in the room. Because of the wood’s natural movement, you don’t want the wood to be jammed up against the walls.
The expansion would cause your planks to push against each other and your walls, whereas contraction would leave strange gaps. To prevent this, savvy floor installers leave a gap between the planks and the walls. But you wouldn’t ever notice that gap because they cover it with molding.
In Conclusion
Now that you know more about measuring your room for your flooring, grab your tape measure and get out there! Always double-check your measurements to ensure that you know exactly what you need. Measure twice, buy once. And you’ll be on your way to having the floors of your dreams and making your house a home in no time!
Sources:
Calculate Your Area | Square Footage Calculator
How to Trace Around a Toilet for a Pattern | SF Gate
How Does Your Home's Indoor Environment Affect Wood Flooring? | Huffington Post
