So, you are ready for new floors! Congratulations! You must be excited, and so are we. It is easy to get overwhelmed when going to the flooring store. Unless you’re in construction, you probably don’t buy floors very often.
How to Shop for New Floors (so you can sound like a pro in the store)!
So how do you sound knowledgeable in the store so you don’t get taken advantage of when buying your new floors? Today, we are going to give you the information you need to walk into the flooring store with confidence by following these three simple steps.
- Get Your Measurements
- Pick Which Type of Flooring is Best For You
- Purchase Your New Dream Flooring
1
Get Your Measurements
For this step, all you will need is a good tape measure! The old “measuring one foot in front of the other” method is great for guessing, but if you are going to spend your hard-earned money on new floors, it’s best to have accurate measurements. You will take the room and measure the length of the room and the width of the room. If the room is not rectangular or square, break the room up into smaller sections and measure the sections. Once you have the measurements, multiply the length times the width to get the square footage. If you broke the room up into sections, add all of the sections together. Do this for all the areas you need.
Example:
Jim has two rooms he needs new flooring in. One room is 13′ x 12′. The second is 11′ x 10′. The first room is 156 SQFT (13 times 12). The second room is 110 SQFT (11 times 10). So in total, the TRUE MEASUREMENT is 266 SQFT (156 plus 110).
Now that you have measured your rooms, it’s time for a very important step: overage. When floors are installed, there are cuts, waste, mistakes, etc. that need to be accounted for when buying material. It is common for people to think, “I’ll just buy a couple of extra boxes.” Sometimes that’s not enough, depending on the size of the job! An industry-standard way of adding overage is to add 10% on top of your true measurement. So in our example with Jim, his true measurement is 266 SQFT. So by adding 10% on top of that, we get about 293 SQFT. Simply multiply your true measurement by “1.1” to get the amount plus overage. Now, when Jim goes to the store, he can confidently let the salesmen know how much flooring he needs.
2
Pick Which Type of Flooring is Best For you!
So, you have the measurements! Now it’s time to go pick out your floors. But maybe you have never bough floors, so you have no idea what the different types of floors are. Or maybe it has just been a while and you could use a refresher. No worries, check out this chart below to pick a floor that works best for you!
3
Purchase!
Now this fun part: go out and buy some new floors! Once you have found your proper measurements and what type of floor you want for your space, you can go into any store sounding like a pro! Our friend Jim, for example, could walk into his favorite flooring store (ahem, The Last Inventory) and say
“Hello! I would like 296 square feet of WPC Flooring, please. And that already includes my 10% overage.”
That statement alone will let your salesman know that you know what you’re talking about. Happy Shopping!