How to Figure Carpet Size

Carpet is typically sold by the yard in 12 or 15 foot widths. When estimating your carpet requirements, you will need to calculate the number of square yards of coverage, while allowing a little overage to ensure you do not come up short. This entails measuring each room's carpeted areas and totaling the figures. The excess allows for trimming the sides precisely at the sides and corners without allowing for gaps.

Tape measure

Instructions

- 1
  Measure the width and length of each room in feet using a tape measure. As an example, if you measured 12 feet and 6 inches for the length and 10 feet and 3 inches for the width, you could simply round those figures up to 13 and 11 feet, respectively.
- 2
  Multiply the width and length of each room to calculate the area. In the example, you would have 143 square feet.
- 3
  Add all the area measurements from each room to be covered. This will calculate the total area. If in the example, you had a second room measuring 12 by 10 feet, then your total coverage area would be 263 square feet.
- 4
  Multiply the total coverage area by 1.10 to factor in some excess. In the example, your new total would be 289 square feet.
- 5
  Divide the new total coverage area by nine to determine the coverage area in square yards. In the example, 289 square feet divided by 9 results in 32.11 square yards. However, because you cannot buy a fraction of a yard of carpet, you would round this figure up to 33 square yards.

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