Vitrified, ceramic, cement or terrazzo: a floor for each room
Four floor materials, compared room by room for a Jaipur home: how each wears, feels underfoot, costs and ages.
Working out tile quantities
A simple method, and why we add wastage.
Ordering the right quantity of tiles saves money and stress. Run short in the middle of a job and the next batch may differ slightly in shade. Order far too many and the extra boxes sit in your parking for years.
Start by measuring each room in feet or metres and calculating the area: length times width. For walls, measure the height to which you are tiling and multiply by the length of each wall, then subtract doors and windows.
Next, add wastage for cuts. For a straight layout, add 8 per cent. For a diagonal or herringbone layout, add 12 to 15 per cent, because many more tiles are cut at the edges. For patterned cement tiles where the design must line up, add 10 per cent.
Divide the total by the area covered by one box, which is printed on the box, and round up. Keep two or three spare tiles from the same batch after the job, labelled and stored, in case one ever cracks. If this sounds like too much arithmetic, send us your plan and our design desk will do it for you.
