Multi room carpet calculator

[leen...]

Hi All,

We are looking to get new carpet for the house with the same carpet throughout. It is likely that we will need a whole roll of carpet. I have a few questions for you all :)

1. Does anyone know of an online calculator which allows you to put in th e dimensions of all the rooms and it works out the optimal cutting/ optmal roll width to get etc. We have a few rooms which have a sort of L shape so thinking the cut out could be used on the stairs e.g. I have used a great wood sheet cut calculator when calculating the cuts for my study project but it only works for rectangles nothing more complex.
2. When measuring the room do I need to add to the dimensions to cater for being slightly out of square or when the fitter fits it do they assume it is a bit over sized so they can cut to size along the skirting?
3. Do I need to worry about fitting all carpet with the nap in the same direction?
4. With the L shaped rooms, is it viable to put a join in the room or will this look bad/ give trouble in the future?

Any other top tips?

thanks in advance

Lee.

[Tim Lamb]

In message [e-mail], " [e-mail]" [e-mail]> writes

1. Don't know of one although it seems possible.
2. There is a degree of *stretch* in carpets. Not stood over a fitter for some years but with underlay and gripper strips fitted to the floor, the carpet is trimmed close to the wall and then stretched over and tucked behind the gripper. A knee kicker does the final stretching and I have seem them use a blunt steel bolster to do the tucking.
3. Yes. We have a lounge wider than the carpet roll. The material is coarse woven finish with no visible directional *nap*. Depending on the light direction, it is apparent that the fitters have reversed the glued on strip.
4. Done well, joins are usually invisible in plain carpet.

You will get a lot of offcuts if you carpet a room having dormer windows:-)

[GB]

You can get away with a change at doorways. Depends on how fussy you are.

I would avoid joins where anyone's going to walk.

Out of interest, how does the carpet cost compare to fitting cost? If this is v expensive carpet, I might put up with more joins to avoid wasting carpet. However, if you're buying a whole roll, anyway...?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

[e-mail] formulated on Sunday :

Carpet fitters do often join carpets, sometimes they have to where there is a wide commercial space to fill, the pattern and the nap has to match at the join. They used to stitch the join, but they also use an hot melt iron on strip now.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

[e-mail] was thinking very hard :

Draw the rooms out to scale, on separate pieces of paper, allowing a bit, cut them out then see how they can best be fitted in the width of carpet and the resulting lengths.

That's what I did on a smaller scale job for hall, stairs and landing.

[leen...]

Thanks all for your thoughts/ advice. On the layout front, I ended up using a combination of the sheet optimiser I used for the study

) and excel. In excel I worked out what the rectangular carpet size required was for each room so that it could be done in a single piece. Then worked out the left overs for each room (e.g. if carpet is 5m and room size is 4.1. then I have a strip of 0.9m OR cut out for ensuite bathroom etc.). I added the rectangular carpet sizes to the panels section, the off cuts to the panels and then a random length of carpet (e.g. 5m x 30m) it then worked it all out to minimise wastage. There were a few issues to deal with though so not perfect

1. It focused on the 5m roll rather than the offcuts so I had to match them myself and remove from the list
2. I tried to get it to optimise across 5m carpet and 4m carpet. Instead it optimised on only using one of them so had to adjust the lengths of the rolls to force it to do it - e.g. only give enough carpet on the 5m roll to cover the rooms that had to have 4m. This is not be optimal as there may have been case where by 2 rooms could be cut out of the 5m width so had to check that manually.

Anyway thought I would reply in case it helps someone else.

thanks

Lee.