Buy Flooring Online

So how much flooring do I really need?

Posted by admin on October 8th, 2008 — Posted in Buying Online, Doing it yourself, Measuring / Estimating

When choosing flooring, it’s important to know how much you will need to do the job.

With tape measure in hand, determine the longest points in the room you want to add flooring. Measure one way, from longest to longest point, to determine the length of the room. Repeat the process to find the width of the room. In both cases, be sure to measure from wall to wall or baseboard to baseboard.

• If you are measuring a kitchen, be sure to include the areas taken up by appliances. While they are not seen, they are areas that need to be covered with the flooring.
• If you are measuring a bedroom, consider the closets when figuring your measurements.
• Always be sure to add a couple of inches to make sure you have enough. Mistakes happen and it’s better to have too much than not enough.

Hard surface flooring is sold by square foot so you will need to determine that before you go shopping for the flooring. To determine the square footage of a room, use this formula once you make your measurements.

1. If you have a room that is 9 feet by 15 feet, multiply 9×15 to get 135. Be sure to round up to the nearest foot before doing your figuring. The square footage of the room is 135 square feet.
2. If your room has an area that does not need flooring, you need to figure that square footage. For example, a fireplace that measures 4 feet by 2 feet is 8 square feet.
3. Subtract the square footage that does not need to be covered (in this case 8 square feet) from the total square footage of the room (135 square feet). That will give you the square feet needed to do the job; in this case you need to cover 127 square feet.
4. Add in about 7% of the square footage to allow enough extra material. Seven percent, in our example, is roughly 9 square feet.
5. You should plan on purchasing roughly 137 square feet of hard surface flooring for our example room.

Soft surface flooring is sold, usually, by the square yard. To determine the square yard, you still need to follow the example above for finding the square foot before you can find the square yardage of the room.

There are nine square feet in one square yard so you need to take the square feet of the room and divide that by nine. In other words, based on our example, 137 square feet divided by 9 gives us 16 square yards.

To sum it all up, use the following equations to determine your flooring needs, making sure to allow an extra 10% or so for each job:

Length x width = square feet

Length x width / 9 = square yards

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