HOW MANY TILES WILL YOU NEED?
When taking on any tiling project it’s important to first calculate how many tiles you’re going to need to complete the job, whether you’re planning on installing your own tile floor or simply calculating the materials you need to budget for.
Wall or floor project? The steps are the same.
What You’ll Need:
- Paper + Pen or pencil
- Measuring tape – Or a laser distance measurer
- Calculator (Or use one of the websites recommended below!)
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Before you start
You should have a clear idea of the size and shape of the area you want to tile.
See below how I proceeded with our guest bathroom:
Wall:
Floor:
You can draw your area on paper (or create an Excel Spreadsheet) in order to determine if the tiles are to cover the whole area or only part of the area. Make sure you settle on a tiling pattern and your grout width.
Remember to take out the spaces for windows or doors but add in any skirting or sills you plan to tile. And also remember to always order an extra 10 to 15% for cuts, breaks and waste. Waste Factor will vary based upon tile size, layout, configuration of room, patterns, etc.
How to proceed?
- Take area measurements – For each area that you want to tile, measure the width and length of the area in feet.
- Multiply your measurements – Multiplying the length by the width to get the square footage of the project area. Do this for each wall or floor area you need tiled, and then add all of the numbers together.
- Calculate the coverage – So now you have the square meterage, but it’s important to buy more tiles than you need to cover the space as you should factor in cuts, waste and breaks. Multiply the square meterage you have by 15%, this will be the actual amount of square meterage you should buy tiles for.
- Work out the amount of tiles – Tiles usually come in boxes with their amount labelled, so divide the total square footage of the room by the total square footage of the tiles in the box.
Example: Let’s say each box contains 10 square feet of tile. So if you need 160 square feet, 10 goes into 160 16 times, so you’ll need to buy at least 16 boxes.
Things are about to get easier...
If you don’t feel entirely comfortable calculating the amount of tiles needed, there are a few websites that can do part of the job for you. I am going to show you below 3 options, so you can pick the one you feel more comfortable using.
You just have to take all the measurements (Tile size and area size) and insert your values in order to get the exact number of tiles needed.
“The following tool estimates the total number of tiles necessary to cover a floor, roof, wall, or any other surface. It also considers the gap or overlap between tiles for better accuracy”.
Calculating the tiles for my bathroom floor
This is one of the tiles we used for our guest bathroom. The tile size is written in the title and in the product overview: 12 3/4 in x 12 3/4 in.
- Below, is the calculation for my bathroom floor (excluding the shower): I entered the tile size (12 3/4 in x 12 3/4 in) and the area size : (87″ * 134″). The result is 69 tiles, with a recommendation of getting between 73 & 76 in total for cuts, waste and breaks.
- Below is the calculation for the shower floor: I entered the tile size (12 3/4 in x 12 3/4 in) and the area size : (40″ * 55″). The result is 14 tiles.
I summed the results : 69 +14 = 73 tiles.
I decided to buy 84 tiles and return the ones I didn’t use once the project was completed. This way, I was sure to avoid any delay in case the tiles were to become out of stock or damaged during installation. Another reason for me to buying additional tiles was because I was designing a Mix & Match floor with a total of 4 different tiles. By buying a few more, I had extra tiles of each pattern.
Knowing that I needed 84 tiles for the entire bathroom floor, I was now able to estimate the cost: 84 * $9.88 = $829.92 (excluding taxes and delivery).
Remember that you can easily return full boxes or full tiles when bought by the piece.
I repeated the calculation process for the wall tiles, and placed my order!
Mix & Match bathroom floor
Do you want to find out how I designed the “Mix and Match bathroom floor”?
Stay tuned for the Mix & Match tutorial and check out the guest bathroom reveal!