Oak Floors Online advise on how to measure your floor area

Working out how much oak flooring you need to order to complete your project is quite simple but depends on a few things;

• The area of floor you intend to cover (in M2)
• The grade of the oak flooring you’re installing
• The shape of the area being covered

You can calculate the area of your rooms by simply measuring the width and the length and multiplying the dimensions together.
Eg: 4m wide x 6m long will be 4 x 6 = 24m2

If you have more than one room to cover, then it’s just a matter of doing this for all the rooms concerned and then adding all the resulting numbers up.

Usually an allowance of 5-6% for cutting and wastage is sufficient but there are a few things you need to be aware of before committing to an order. You don’t want to order your flooring and towards the end of the project find out that you’re 1 carton short because this may result in you having to pay another delivery charge.

Likewise but vice versa, you don’t want to end up with 3-4 cartons left over after the installation is complete either.

Industry standards state that manufacturers can sell oak flooring with a maximum of 5% natural defects that are not included within the specified grade of that same flooring, so there’s a possibility that you will need to cut out some features or defects that are not suitable for what you want.

Obviously lower grades of flooring have more natural defects, so there’s a risk of you having to cut out more features, depending on what finished floor appearance you want.

A Prime Grade A oak flooring is grade A only, so the finish will be very consistent, resulting in very little wastage for features that you don’t want, meaning that you could get away with a very small allowance like 2-3%.

Mixed grade flooring will have more natural features, so an extra 5-6% should be allowed.

It’s always difficult for the flooring supplier to tell you how much extra you need to order because an unacceptable defect to one person could be a beautiful natural feature to someone else.

The above percentages are suitable for square or rectangular rooms but if your rooms have lots of diagonal cuts or bay windows, then the extra required for cutting and wastage can increase to 10-12%.

If you can, always ask your flooring installer to measure up and tell you how much flooring you need to order because they have (or should have) the experience to work this out quickly.