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Carpet Laying And Estimating Website
Estimating And Planning
The purpose of measuring the room or house, as detailed in Chapter 4, is to obtain all the basic facts of the installation—dimensions and layout of rooms, unusual features, special considerations, and the like —in order to prepare the estimate and plan the installation.
This is the all-important intermediate step between taking the measurements and laying the carpet. Time and care spent in estimating and planning save time, worry, and money in the actual installation. The objectives of estimating and planning are not only to compute the yardage on the most economical basis to achieve the maximum of eye appeal and serviceability, but also to consider possible alternate ways of doing the same job, and to resolve all foreseeable difficulties or special problems before the carpet is actually cut and seamed.
Whether the estimating is for a job already contracted for, or merely on a speculative or competitive basis, the objectives of customer eye appeal, minimum wastage, and maximum serviceability still hold. Estimating, in any event, carries over into planning for the handling of the carpet in the workroom.
SCALE DRAWINGS
We've already mentioned the need for scale drawings following the making of the rough sketch during the measuring operation. Some of the simpler installations may require only a neat pencil sketch. But it's a safe general rule that on most jobs where the area is either irregular, extensive, or complicated in some way, a scale drawing is not only desirable but necessary.
A scale drawing is a sketch or plan (in pencil, for our purpose) drawn with a straight-edge (ruler or triangle) and exactly proportioned in all its parts to the original object—or room, in our case. In other Words, the drawing is an exact duplicate of the room in miniature, so that if wall A B in the actual room is twice the length of wall BC the line representing AB in the drawing will then be twice the length of the line representing BC. A line representing a distance of one foot will be one-third the length of a line representing 3 ft, and so on.
With an exact scale drawing of a room, distances that were not actually measured can be computed fairly accurately—at least down to a couple of inches or so, depending on the scale of the drawing. Errors or inconsistencies, as well as unforeseen problems that might not show up on a rough sketch, will be discovered when the plan is redrawn to scale. Scale drawings also make possible the accurate estimating and re-use of waste material—before any cutting is done! (See Figs. 5.1 and 5.2.)
