How this calc works

Carpet is sold by the square yard even though you measure your room in feet. This calc takes your room area in square feet and divides by 9 (there are 9 square feet in a square yard) to give the square-yard figure the carpet store quotes from.

The wrinkle carpet installers live with: broadloom carpet comes in fixed roll widths, usually 12 feet. A 13-foot-wide room cannot be covered by one width, so you either seam or waste the strip past 12 feet. The raw square-yard number is your floor; the roll width decides how much extra you actually buy.

Common mistakes

The big mistake is quoting the raw square yardage and ignoring roll width. A room slightly wider than the roll forces a seam and extra material; the math says one thing, the roll says another.

The second is forgetting pattern match. Patterned carpet wastes material to align the repeat across seams — the related pattern-match calc covers that add-on, which a plain raw-area number will not.

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