Are your stairs in need of a fresh look? Transform them instantly with a new carpet installation. However, before you go ahead and purchase materials, it’s crucial to measure your stairs accurately for a perfect fit. In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the process of measuring carpet for stairs, ensuring that you obtain precisely what you require to achieve a flawless result.
Understanding the terminologies
Before you can measure for carpet, it’s important to understand the terminology used to describe the parts of the stair you’ll be measuring. The width is how wide each stair is from side to side. The run is the depth of the stair tread, or where you place your foot. The rise is the height of the stairs — the distance between the top of one tread and the tread below it. If your staircase’s treads overhang the riser by an inch or two, this overhang is often called the nose or lip.
Step 1: Measure the stairs
Use a flexible tape measure to measure the rise and the run. If your treads have a nose, put the tape measure at the bottom of the step and run the tape measure up and around the overhang and then to the back of the tread for the most accurate measurement.
Step 2: Multiply by the number of steps
Check your staircase to make sure you have an equal number of risers and treads. Staircases that lead down from a hardwood floor often have an additional carpeted riser above the top step that you must include in your calculations. If you measured the rise and run in inches, divide the result by 12 to get it in feet.
Step 3: Determine the width of the stairs
Stretch the tape measure from the left side of the tread to the right. Add 2 inches to the measurement to cover the edges. If you measured in inches, divide the result by 12 to get it in feet. Multiply the results of step 2 in feet by the width of the stairs in feet to calculate the square footage of carpet needed.
Step 4: Don’t forget the landings
If your staircase has landings, you must also measure them to get the correct estimate of carpet needed. Landings are typically square or rectangular, so you simply need to measure the length and width and multiply the two measurements. Convert inches to feet before multiplying to get square feet. Add that measurement to the square footage results from step 3. Source: Hunker
Step 5: Give room for mistakes
Add 10% extra to avoid running out of carpeting. Mistakes can happen while carpet is being installed, and it’s always better to have too much carpeting than too little. So, add in an extra 10% of the total to make sure that you’ll have enough carpeting to compensate for any errors your or the carpet installers may make. Source: WikiHow
Consider the pile’s direction
The carpet on stairs must run in the same direction on every stair, and the direction of the pile must go with the flow of traffic — from top to bottom, not from side to side. This means that, in order to work with the size of a roll of carpet, not all of the stairs are installed in one piece. Source: TheSpruce
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