How do you calculate stair carpet material.

[ChiefNICKELSON]

When I do a material list for the floor and I'm looking at my flooring take off I see my carpet and pad is only calculating the rooms and not the amount of carpet on the stairs. It does include the two stair landings as you go up the stairs, but not the tread or risers. I want to know how much carpet for the treads and risers also. How do you do that? 

Final Schrader Basement.plan

[Joe_Carrick]

I never calculate carpet on stairs.  But that's just because I hate carpet on stairs.

[rgardner]

Just as an FYI from a long time Flooring Industry Expert as you should never take the flooring takeoff for sheet vinyl or carpet too close to the takeoff amount.  Even though it may be 1000 square feet you may actually need 1400-1600 square feet as they come generally in 6' and 12' rolls and there is patterns to take into account and layout.

[robdyck]

5 hours ago, ChiefNICKELSON said:

When I do a material list for the floor and I'm looking at my flooring take off I see my carpet and pad is only calculating the rooms and not the amount of carpet on the stairs. It does include the two stair landings as you go up the stairs, but not the tread or risers. I want to know how much carpet for the treads and risers also. How do you do that? 

Final Schrader Basement.plan 8.78 MB · 1 download

For Carpet, add a runner. Then edit the components tab as shown

[Alaskan_Son]

Setting proper pattern match and efficient material usage aside for a moment, here are my quick pieces of advice:

1. Yes, you can use a Runner but that has some notable issues.  First off, it doesn't give you a proper total in the material list. To get usable information, you would have to customize your Component information for each and every set of stairs you build.  And even then, this method won't work for winders, flares, starter treads, or other non continuous width stair designs where you want carpet on the whole step. 
2. To get a more accurate result that doesn't need to be customized every time, you can use the steps Collection.  This method requires some pretty custom coding to parse and combine the information, but is far more accurate and can be added to the stair Components in your Defaults. 

[robdyck]

The VERY simplest way to get this material takeoff is to forward the plan to the supplier. They'll gladly do it for free!!

[ChiefNICKELSON]

19 hours ago, rgardner said:

Just as an FYI from a long time Flooring Industry Expert as you should never take the flooring takeoff for sheet vinyl or carpet too close to the takeoff amount.  Even though it may be 1000 square feet you may actually need 1400-1600 square feet as they come generally in 6' and 12' rolls and there is patterns to take into account and layout.

Yes I agree. I do add waste for it, but primarily use this information as a starting point to convert it to square yardage. Then I use it to build allowances and to pass on to our carpet vendors who come and do final take off before ordering.

[ChiefNICKELSON]

Thank you guys I was able to use a runner and change the components to list is correctly in my material list. I have the carpet runner and ID for flooring. Although the calculation of the area of the carpet on the stairs doesn't calculate correctly. Still discovering how to use, even create macros for calculations. Any tutorials on how to develop them?

[raltd9245]

On 5/27/2021 at 11:18 AM, ChiefNICKELSON said:

When I do a material list for the floor and I'm looking at my flooring take off I see my carpet and pad is only calculating the rooms and not the amount of carpet on the stairs. It does include the two stair landings as you go up the stairs, but not the tread or risers. I want to know how much carpet for the treads and risers also. How do you do that? 

Final Schrader Basement.plan 8.78 MB · 6 downloads

To many times lately people stray from their lane. This is an example. Send your plan to a carpet guy or two and get the correct answer.

[Alaskan_Son]

49 minutes ago, raltd9245 said:

To many times lately people stray from their lane. This is an example. Send your plan to a carpet guy or two and get the correct answer.

Some of us like to avoid having to get our subs and suppliers to do takeoffs every time we want a rough estimate.  It adds up to an astronomical number of man hours, adds extra steps, adds to the timeline, introduces an increased chance for miscommunication, etc.  In at least the early phases it can be far more efficient to tabulate all those quantities ourselves.

[joey_martin]

Last time I did quick calcs for stairs I think we used 2.5sqft per tread and 2sqft per riser. 9sqft per landing if the stairs are 36" wide. Add all that and add 10% for a guestimate.