Vinyl flooring is a durable, relatively affordable flooring alternative suitable for families with small kids or do-it-yourself homeowners on a budget. Measuring the distance you plan to pay with vinyl tiles isn’t hard, but it may require some of the formulas you learned in high school geometry. Plan to buy 10 percent more plastic than your measurements indicate you need because you are bound to want some additional.
Divide the Space
Finding the area of a rectangle is simple, but if the rooms you need to pay are not square, measuring them can become a little more complex. To create an irregular shape manageable, split it into squares, rectangles, triangles and semicircles. Lay the ground plan on a sheet of chart paper, and draw dotted lines across the room wherever necessary to split the space into identifiable geometric shapes. Afterwards, you may use these shapes to find the area of every component of the room.
Measure the Dimensions
When you measure the room, do not measure walls. Rather, measure the size of every shape you sketched in your floor plan. If a wall belongs to two individual shapes on the sketch, measure each section individually. Then, tag each edge on the sketch with its own measurement. In case you have any semicircular sections, measure the diameter across the imaginary line that divides the semicircle in the rest of the room, then measure the radius in the center of that line to the wall. Simply take all of your measurements in inches.
Locate the Areas
Once you’ve got all of the measurements graphed on your newspaper, the job becomes a basic geometry worksheet. Find the area of each shape on the page. For those rectangles and squares, multiply the length by the width. For those triangles, multiply the base by the height, then divide the answer by two. For those semicircles, which can be likely really ovals, the practice is a little more complex. Divide the diameter by two, then multiply the result from the radius; multiply the product by 3.14; finally, divide the total by two.
Calculate the Entire
Add the regions of all of the sections together to find the total area of the flooring in square inches. Because vinyl flooring is sold in square feet or square yards, the last step would be to convert the components. Divide the region in square inches from 144 to obtain the region in square feet. If you’re buying vinyl from the square yard, split the region in square feet by 9. As an example, if the total area is 7,200 square inches, then divide this by 144 to get 50 square feet, then split 50 from 9 to get 5.55 square yards.