Guides

Which guide to read, and when

The guides are written to be read at a particular point in a job, and the order matters more than the topic. If you are still choosing what to buy, start with the comparisons. If the product is chosen and you need a number for the order, go to the guide on quantities for that trade. If the material is already in the house, read the layout guide before the first cut, because that is when its advice is cheapest to follow.

Choosing the material

LVP vs laminate answers the question most people bring to the flooring aisle — which one for which room — and the answer turns on water: one has a plastic core, the other a fibreboard core that swells and stays swollen. Porcelain vs ceramic tile does the same job for tile, starting from the absorption test that actually separates the two and going on to what the difference means for cutting, waste and price.

Sizing the order

These answer "how much do I buy?" for each trade. Flooring waste factor sets the allowance by material, room shape and layout, and tile waste factor by pattern does the same for tile, with the table the calculators actually apply. The two thousand-square-foot guides work a large job through from start to finish — how much flooring for 1,000 square feet for a whole floor, and how much paint for 1,000 square feet for a thousand square feet of wall — so you can check a calculator’s answer against a worked example. How many coats of paint decides whether you are buying for one coat, two, or primer and two; how many sheets of drywall gives sheet counts with the screws, compound and tape that go with them; and the baseboard and trim measuring guide takes you from the perimeter of a room to the number of sticks.

Laying it out

How to stagger vinyl plank flooring and how to lay out a tile floor are the ones to read before the first cut. They decide where the cuts land, and the cuts are where the waste comes from. The shower tile planning guide belongs earlier still, before anything is ordered for a shower: three walls, a pan, a curb and a niche are measured differently, and the waterproofing has to be planned with them.

Four common jobs, in reading order

• New floor in one room: the vinyl and laminate comparison, then the flooring waste factor, then the stagger guide on the day you start.
• Tiling a bathroom: porcelain or ceramic first, then waste by pattern and the tile layout guide, and the shower guide if there is a shower.
• Repainting before new floors go down: how many coats, then the paint quantities for the wall area you actually have.
• Finishing a basement room: drywall sheets, then coats of paint, then the flooring guides, and the baseboard guide last, because the trim goes on after the floor is down.

How the guides and the calculators fit together

Every guide points to the calculator that does its arithmetic, and the two are built from the same parts. The scale plans in the flooring, tile layout, stagger and tile waste guides are drawn by the calculator engine when the site is built, not by hand, and the numbers in their captions come out of the same calculation. The waste table in the tile guide is read from the file the calculators use, so the page cannot drift away from the tool.

Where a guide relies on a published standard, a building code or a manufacturer’s instructions, it names it in a Sources section at the end, with a link. Where a number is this site’s own judgement — a waste allowance, a price, a rule of thumb — the guide says so instead of dressing it up. Each guide also shows the date its page last changed, taken from the site’s own file history rather than typed in, so you can see how recently it was checked.