Calculating Square Footage: What Homeowners Need to Know

 Importance of Proper Measuring Techniques

Inaccurate calculations or measurements are a huge contributor to project delays and headaches. It is also sometimes purposely misrepresented by some vendors in order to mark up the price of products. Being able to accurately calculate square footage, and defend your calculations informatively, is a must when buying finished coverings, in order to save time and money.


To start of this section we will first discuss how to draw a simple sketch of a room and calculate the floor area of that room for tile. Even with a basic square room there are issues that can affect how much product one would need to cover the floor, and can lead to inaccurate calculations, over spending, and/or costly project delays.


Sketch


A sketch is a drawing of an area that includes measurements in relation to the specific dimensions of the view. A sketch can be hand drawn or done with simple computer programs such as Microsoft paint. A sketch will allow the reader to better understand the measurements of a particular area and serve as reference to any specific points that will aid in accurate dimensioning. Many people will recognize a sketch as resembling a blue print or floor plan which is always used by builders or any other vendors who are involved in using or selling construction materials.


Our example sketch will be a square bathroom for tile installation on the floor. However as mentioned above, even in a perfectly square bathroom, there may be obstacles or variations that will correlate with how much tile we actually need to cover our floor. The following is a short list of ‘things to look out for’.


- Door openings


Door openings are often overlooked when dimensioning, but should be considered when you are calculating floor covering material. In a perfectly square room failing to consider door openings will result in a small lack of material which could be costly.


The standard interior wall in a home is constructed by 2”x4” wall studs, which has ½” drywall on both sides. In order to ensure that when a door is closed you are not seeing a strip of floor covering from the opposite room, the floor covering in our bathroom needs to extend about 2 inches beyond the wall and ends directly under the door. This ensures that when our doors are closed our floor coverings cannot be seen in either room on both sides of the door. Failing to take into account this small amount of material could affect the outcome of the finished product, or as stated, lead to delays in purchasing additional material, or result in often costly wasted labor hours. Each door opening in our area needs to be addressed in our sketch and in our calculations order to accommodate the appropriate amount of materials.

- Protrusions such as vanities and bath tubs


In almost any case a bathroom will have at least one vanity cabinet and a bath tub or shower stall. This may also affect the amount of actual material that needs to be considered for our tile.


In almost every case it is not possible and/or economically viable to install tile beneath a bath tub or shower stall. In new construction tile is never installed beneath these objects, as they are never seen and considered a waste of material. Unless our bathroom has been remodeled before it is highly unlikely the existing floor covering is beneath our tub, in which case we do not have to figure this area when calculating our square footage. If the material we are using for our installation is high grade and pricy, this will save us money.


Vanity cabinets on the other hand must be considered separately. Some builders do in fact install floor covering before vanities are placed in the bathroom, and some install the cabinets before the floor covering is placed. Should we be overlaying an existing floor we probably will not have to remove the vanity cabinet, and thus we can deduct the square footage of bathroom tile we need from our overall material calculations. However, if we have existing floor covering down in our bathroom, it may be possible we do in fact have to remove the vanity in order to also remove the floor covering beneath it before we install our new tile. In this situation we do indeed need to consider this area for being covered by our new tile.


These are just two areas of interest we should consider when factoring actual used material we will need, so as you can see, even in a perfectly square bathroom tile installation there’s other factors which could either save you money, or lead to over spending on materials and labor delays.


Now that we have addressed just a couple of things to look out for when creating our sketch dimensions and material considerations we will move on to calculating square footage.


- How to figure square footage

Calculating square footage is actually fairly straight forward and easy. The basic formula is multiplying the length of the area times the width. So in simple terms if our bathroom is 12 feet by 12 feet (12’x12’) the square footage is 144 square feet (144sf). In our example we will say that we have a 3 feet by 2.5 foot vanity cabinet (3”x2’6”), and a 6 feet by 2.5 foot bath tub (6’x2’6”) that will not have to be considered for tile replacement. In our example we will address the location and dimensions of these areas on our sketch, and we will deduct this amount from our overall material needs. We simply use the same formula on these two areas as we did to calculate our overall room square footage and subtract that amount from the room total.


Bye calculating the vanity cabinet and tub square footage and adding those two areas together we reach a total of 22.5 square feet. As you can see, if we had merely calculated our overall room square footage for tile replacement we would have purchased a fairly significant amount of tile that would not be used. Now that we have our total square footage for the vanity and bath tub (22.5sf) we can subtract that from our overall floor square footage total (144sf) to reach the actual amount of tile we need at 121.5 square feet.


This is just one example of how we have taken into consideration variables and used our sketch to figure an accurate amount of tile for our bathroom floor. Later we will discuss other variables that would affect our tile or material needs, such as pattern match, un-square walls, installation waste and a plethora of other situations you may encounter which will help you in accurately considering the amount of material you need for your project.

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