Before You Buy

A little prep work can save you a whole lot of headaches when you’re looking to buy new floors. Whether you’re handling the install yourself, or working with one of our qualified installers, there’s a few things you should be aware of in order to make the process as smooth as possible.

One of the most common situations we find our customers looking at, is they simply don’t know what they don’t know. It’s really easy to look at your 300 square foot room and decide to purchase 300 square feet of flooring. This would be a mistake for several reasons.

The most obvious reason, and you likely know this, is that you’re going to need more square feet of flooring than the room itself. We usually suggest 10% to 15% more flooring than the room size for cuts (and mis-cuts) in order to ensure you have enough product to finish the job. Professional installers can get away with 10%, but if you’re a DIY’er, you’ll want to stick closer to that 15%. It never hurts to have a few extra pieces laying around in case something gets damaged.

What may be less obvious is knowing what prep is required for the flooring. What condition is the subfloor? Is it level? What product are you putting on top of it? All of these answers will help determine the best product for you and the amount of prep time required.

Those questions above may also affect your budget. If you’ve allocated three thousand dollars to your flooring project, you can’t just buy three thousand dollars of flooring. Not only do you have to factor in any subfloor prep, there’s also underlayment and installation to consider.

Don’t worry though, we’ll walk you through every step of the process. We’ve done this more than a few times. We know to consider things like - do you need the baseboards removed and reinstalled, or is that something you will be handling?

Before you buy, take advantage of our flooring calculators to help you calculate your square footage, cost, and budget.

Square Foot Calculator

Once you know the length and width of your room, you can use our Square Foot Calculator to find out how much flooring you’ll need.

To figure out how to measure properly we have a guide and some tips to make sure you get it right. As it goes with the old adage: measure twice, cut once.

Cost Calculator

Knowing the square footage will then make it possible to know how much your flooring will cost. This does not include installation or extra material.

Budget Calculator

If you have a budget in mind, then you can input your budget and square footage and the calculator will tell you how much you can afford per square foot.