How to Measure for Flooring

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson and I'm going to talk to you about how to measure flooring. Now regardless of whether you are doing carpet or hardwood floors or tiles, the principles for measuring for flooring are all the same. So if we look at this room here, we got a rectangular shape room but with one element, we got a bay window here that we got to take into consideration. So what we are going to do and what I like to do is I like to draw up a sketch of an area like this and then I can just label down what my dimensions are. So what we'll do is we are going to measure the width from the wall to the beginning of this bay window. And then we'll measure the depth and we'll have a rectangular dimension. And we can figure the square footage by multiplying the width by the depth of the room. Now for the bay window it's a little bit more of a calculation to it. I've got this, what I'll do is I'll measure and I've got the long opening of the measurement and then I'll go back by the window and measure the short. So if this happens to be about ten feet and then the or twelve feet here for the opening, and eight feet for the length by the windows. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add those two together and divide by two, so in this case I'd get a ten foot measurement. So the twelve plus the eight divided by two. And then I'm going to measure the depth which in this case is about three feet. So by doing that, I've measured the long, add the long side to the short side, divide by two and measure the depth and that will give me my square footage. And then of course if you have any room that has such as a kitchen that has an island in it or cabinets, you want to deduct for the size of the cabinets and not figure that into it. And it's usually a good idea particularly if you are installing a flooring surface by yourself, it's a good idea to figure at least ten percent waste into your figure so you make sure you have enough. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to measure for flooring."