How to Calculate Total Square Feet & Order Laminate Flooring

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm James, with JNC Home Repair. Today I'm going to show you how to calculate square footage and order laminate flooring. Basically if you've got carpet or tile, or some kind of linoleum laid down on your floor, you're going to need to remove that. But you can actually calculate your square footage without doing that. Basically what you want to do is you want to measure the width of the room and then you want to measure the length of the room. Let's say you've got a 10 foot width of the room and you've got a 12 foot length of the room, so basically it's a 10x12 room. You just write down your 10x12, basically all you do is you times the 10 by 12 and that's going to give you the square footage of the room, 10 by 12 equals 120, so a 10x12 room is 120 square foot. Now what you want to do is if you're ordering laminate for this particular room, you don't want to just order 120 feet because you've got to account for cuts, as the stuff snaps into place you're going to have to cut off a few pieces here and there. So a good rule of thumb is to add at least 10 or 15 percent to the total square footage. So if you want to add 10 percent to this 120 square foot, you know that's going to be 12 feet. So you're going to add another 12 feet to it, so you want to buy 132 feet to actually do a 10x12 room. And basically that's all there is to calculating square footage and determining how much you're going to need."