Let’s say you just bought a new house—a fixer-upper, for all intents and purposes. The first thing that comes to mind is just how much work you now have on your shoulders. Maybe you got a great deal on the house, but now you need to start working from the ground up to get it in good enough shape to live in. The best way to start is by doing just that—working from the ground up. There’s no point in starting on anything else if your house doesn’t even have a sturdy floor that you feel comfortable putting things on.
If you look around the house and know that hardwood floors are the way you want to go, you’ll need to solve a bit of a math problem before you can start looking at wood samples. It’s a good idea to know how much flooring you’ll need before you start trying to choose between oak or walnut wood. Here at Hardwoods4less, we don’t want you to waste a single minute more than is necessary to get the beautiful flooring you want for your home.
That’s why we’ve created a helpful guide to knowing how much wood flooring you need. This guide should be able to walk you through the process of ordering the right amount of wood. You’ll find that the process isn’t all that difficult, but there are a few places where someone new to buying flooring could get tripped up and make a mistake.
What You’ll Need
To calculate the amount of wood you’ll need to cover your whole area, you’ll need a couple of tools. Perhaps the most obvious tool you’ll need is a tape measure to figure out the dimensions of the rooms that need new flooring. Because your floors are the foundation for the rest of your home, it’s a good idea to make sure that your tape measure is actually accurate. Messing up your measurements early on won’t just make the floor harder to install; it will also cost you more money in the long run.
It’s also likely that you’ll need a calculator to make sure you properly find the exact measurements of the floor you need to cover. Estimations aren’t going to help you in this scenario. The more accurate you can be with your measurements, the better off you’ll be. You’ll also need it to calculate an allowance for wastage, which we’ll talk a little more about later.
Most Important Considerations for Flooring
You might think it’s pretty simple to measure a floor to find the right amount of wood you need, and you might also think a guide to knowing how much wood flooring you need could simply tell you to calculate an area and be done with it. Unfortunately, the process isn’t quite as simple as you might wish. If you need to measure a perfectly square room with nothing changing its shape or getting in the way, you could get by without too much extra work. But even in that case, it’s important to know about other concerns like wastage so that you can make sure you order the right amount of wood.
Your Room’s Area
Clearly, the area of the room you want to cover with hardwood flooring is the most important part of figuring out how much wood you need. As we said, as soon as your room is anything other than a perfect square, the measurements become more difficult. For example, if the room you want to cover has an attached closet, you must consider how that adds to the total area of the room. The best way to account for oddly shaped rooms with bends or turns in them is to break them up into multiple square or rectangular sections. Measure the length and width of each section separately, then multiply the length by the width. This will give you the shape’s area in units squared. You can then add up every individual shape’s area to get the total amount of square footage or square meters you need to order your flooring of choice.
Width of Wood Planks
Using wider planks of wood for your hardwood flooring can reduce the number of noticeable seams in between separate planks. A lot of people prefer this look because it can make the finished product seem cleaner, but it’s important to know how wide you plan to have your planks be. The wider the planks you choose, the fewer you’ll need in total. However, you may need to consider wastage a little more carefully if you plan to use wider hardwood planks.
Allowance for Wastage
Wastage is the word used to refer to the wood that you’ll need to cut away in order to fit each plank in your room properly. You can’t order hardwood flooring according to the pinpoint accurate amount you need for your room, and you wouldn’t want to anyway. If you did and then made a mistake while cutting, you’d be completely out of luck.
Adding a wastage percentage can help make sure that you get enough wood to fix mistakes and still cover the entire room. A standard wastage percentage that you want to add to your total is around five percent, but you can also tack another five percent on top of that if your room is shaped in a particularly strange or irregular way. The more oddly shaped a room is, the more trimming to size you’ll likely need to do. Thus, you’ll want more wood to cover for the wasted wood you’ll trim to make the flooring fit.
Once you have a good idea about the amount of wood you’ll need to finish your project, we invite you to check out our selection of hardwood flooring at Hardwoods4less. We help cut out the middleman when it comes to selling flooring, which helps provide our customers the opportunity to finish their flooring projects without breaking the bank. For high-quality closeout hardwood flooring, look through our collections. You’re sure to find the perfect hardwood that will match your style and your home’s aesthetic.
