Knowing exactly how large your room is can be a very important piece of information. This can be important for many different things such as remodeling, buying new furniture, renting the place to someone else, and a few other occasions. Some people often like to replace their current flooring in their apartment, which is a procedure that requires you to know exactly how large a surface you need to cover, and for this, you’ll need to be very precise in your calculations.
In today’s article we’re going to tell you exactly how to calculate the square footage of your room without making any mistakes, as well as a few reasons why you should be doing this, so let’s not waste any more time and jump straight into the content.
Contents
Empty your room and remove obstacles
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We’re not sure how your room is laid out, which is why we cannot tell if you can skip this step or not, but in most cases, you’ll have to remove things such as couches, beds, chairs, and tables to be able to carry on with the procedure. Once you’re done with this, you can move freely in the room, and it’s time to start measuring and do the required calculations. You will need some items for all this to be successful, so let’s take a look at what exactly you’ll have to prepare.
Grab the following helping items
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A tape measure will be the first thing you need, so make sure that you have that ready. Next, you’ll need a calculator and a notepad. A pen or a pencil is required to record all of your measurements before you do the final calculations. The dimensions can also be written digitally, so if you prefer that way instead of writing with a pen, feel free to do so. Any smartphone or tablet will do the job. Once you have all of these items ready, it’s time to start taking the measures.
What kind of room do you have?
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If you have a regular rectangular-shaped room, there are only two dimensions that you need to measure, which are the length and the width. Make sure that you start measuring from the wall, not from the spot where your flooring ends. Wall-to-wall is important and it’s the correct way to do this. But, if your room has a different, more unique shape, things will be slightly different.
If your room is oddly shaped, you’ll have to manually “construct” your squares or rectangles, and measure those, then combine the square footage by adding all of those together and getting the final result. Simply separate your room in many different areas and mark them as “Part 1”, “Part 2”, “Part 3”, and so on. The same procedure from the above applies to this method as well. Multiply the width and length of part 1, then add it to the multiplied width and length of part 2, and so on.
If for some reason you’re having trouble getting access to paper, or you don’t know how to manually do the calculations, you can always use helpful tools such as online square-footage calculators. Feel free to learn more here.
What’s a waste factor?
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No matter what kind of project you’re going to do, it’s always important that you calculate the waste factor as well. For those of you who are not familiar with this term, it’s the number of extra materials that you’ll have to purchase for your calculated square footage, in case any errors happen during the procedure.
It’s not very rare for some of the purchased material to get damaged during the process of cutting, installing, and all of what needs to be done by the person who’s going to do the job. To avoid finding yourself in a situation where you don’t have enough materials to complete the task, make sure to add the waste factor in your final calculations. This is usually five to ten extra percent. If we’re talking about a 150 square footage room, multiply 150 by 0.10, and you’ll get 15 sqft extra material. That is if you want to go with 10%.
What’s the next step?
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Once you’re done will all the measurements and calculations, you must get your room back into its previous shape. This means placing back all of the furniture and objects that you removed before starting the measuring step. Or, if the remodeling, re-flooring or whatever type of project you want to do should happen shortly, it is better that you keep the room empty.
Conclusion
Knowing exactly how much square footage your living area is can be crucial for many different things, which is why we decided that it’s important to teach you how to properly measure it. Whenever you want to do some remodeling or you want to create a listing to sell your home, you must inform all of the buyers exactly how large the area is. We hope that our guide was helpful to you as we tried to keep things as simple and easy to understand as possible.
