How to Calculate Square Footage

So you desire to improve the appearance of your room by painting the walls or installing new flooring. No matter what kind of paint or flooring you choose, you need to ascertain the square footage of the floor or the walls. Even though a little bit of mathematics is involved, calculating square footage is not going to be that tough. It is very easy to measure the square footage of a room. All you will require is a measuring tape, paper, pencil and a calculator.

Follow these step by step instructions and it will be you who will be telling people how to measure square footage from now onwards –

- You will need to have two measurements of the floor or the wall you wish to ascertain the square footage. Let us use the floor as an example. With the help of a measuring tape, measure the length of the floor in inches and note down the figure on a piece of paper. Even though we are working on square footage, it is better to measure in inches as it is very uncommon for a floor to have exact even number foot measurement. For instance, a length of a floor is more likely to have measurements such as 12 feet 4 inches instead of a whole number.

- Measure the width of the floor and note it down again on the same piece of paper.

- Once you have the length and width, multiply the two measurements to calculate the figure. You may take the help of a calculator if required. The answer you get is square inches.

- Now you need to divide the answer by 144 to express it as square footage.

The above steps apply for a rectangular or square area. If you wish to measure a triangle area then follow the below mentioned steps –

- Firstly, measure the base of the triangle.

- Secondly, you need to measure the height of the triangle.

- Now you need to multiply the base measurement with the height measurement. You may use a calculator to determine the figure. Once you get the figure, divide the amount by two. The figure you get now is the square footage of a triangle area.

For calculating the square footage of the circular area, you need to measure the radius of the circle, square it up and lastly multiply it by pie (3.1416) to determine the figure.