How to Calculate Wallpaper Measurements

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Tim Gipson, I'm going to talk to you about how to measure for wallpaper. Now wallpaper is sold by the square foot. So you'll either buy it typically in a 25 square foot roll or a 50 square foot roll which are called double rolls. So in order to calculate how much wallpaper we're going to need for our room, we need to measure the height and the width of each wall and deduct for any openings, come up with a total square footage for the room and then we're going to add 10% just to account for any waste. Now if you're having to do the measurements by yourself, then it's very helpful to have something like this which is actually an electronic measurer. This particular one has a laser that's built into it so you can make sure you're pointed to the right part of the wall. And what this does it just sends out little sound waves, receives them back and then gives you a measurement. Whenever you're using one of these it's usually a good idea to take 2 or 3 measurements per each wall just to make sure you get an accurate reading. So if we're going to do this wall here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold the end of this against this wall here and then I will press and you can see it has a red light that shows up on the other wall and again what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a couple measurements. So I come up with a measurement that is 11 foot 6. So I know this wall is 11 foot 6 in height. Now I know that these are 9 foot ceilings but again if I'm not certain then I can actually come down to the floor, place this on the floor and then shoot straight up and again take a couple measurements and I come up and sure enough I get a measurement of 11 feet. Now we can actually calculate length and width which is kind of nice. You can actually do memory inputs so as you're measuring these you can, this will actually account for your square footage on your walls otherwise I'd have a piece of paper and I would write this down so I'd know that in this particular case I have 99 square feet plus another 4 and a half square feet so I have 103 and a half square feet just on this particular wall. Then I would go around the room and I would measure this. Now when we get to a wall with windows such as over here, we need to measure the wall and then also measure the opening of the window so in this case this is a 3 foot by 6 foot window and I've got two of those so I would measure that wall and then I would deduct 36 square feet out of there for the openings around the windows. And again once I calculate all this, add all the areas up, deduct for all my openings, I'm going to add 10% to whatever I get so if I come up with 350 square feet, I'm going to add another 35 square feet to that just to account for any waste so I'll know I'll need 385 square feet of wallpaper. So I'm Tim Gibson and that's how to measure for wallpaper."