How to Measure the Amount of Carpet for Stairs

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Tim Gibson and I'm going to show you how to measure for carpet. Now there's two type of things we get into when we're measuring for carpet, that is in this case we have a standard carpet that is a wall to wall type of carpet. So in this case we're going to measure the width and we'll look at this landing area. If I measure this landing area, I'm going to measure from the base of this stair to the baseboard and I get 40 inches. Now actually what we're going to do when we install our carpet and I'll show you on this spare piece, is that we'll actually are going to fold an inch of this carpet over when we install it. So as you can see that on the profile, that's actually how it installs with an inch of that rolled over. That goes into your pull or is stapled in. That makes sure we have a nice finished edge on our carpet. So with that in mind, when I measured that width, I need to add two inches to that width, to the measurement, and that's the actual width of the carpet that I need to carpet this area. Now the second instance we run into is when we have wood stairs that we want to run a carpet runner down. In that case I'm going to measure the tread length of my carpet and in this case they're 45 inches. So if I want a runner that leaves me at least three inches on each side, I'm going to take off six inches for the width of the carpet so that my runner will be 39 inches. So it's very important if you're doing a wall to wall type of carpet, you want to add two inches on to the dimension, so you know how wide a piece to cut in order to install because you're going to roll those edges in. For a runner you're actually going to take off the width from your actual treads to get your actual width of your runner. So I'm Tim Gibson and that's how to measure for carpet on your stairs."