The First Step Is Figuring out How Much Paper to Purchase

The first step when deciding to wallpaper an area, is figuring out how much paper to purchase. You will have to figure out the square footage for the area. This is done by multiplying the width of the wall times the height of the wall. If the wall is ten foot wide or long along the bottom, and eight foot high, then the wall contains 80 square feet. If all four walls in the room are the same then there will be 320 square feet in the room. Some wallpapering directions will advise you to subtract for window and door areas in the room, but I don't do it that way. It isn't a bad idea to have extra paper handy in case you make a mistake or you find a blemish in the middle of a roll of paper that will make it un-usable. The manufacturer's directions usually always tell you to inspect each roll for possible blemishes before beginning the wallpaper hanging process. After you come up with the square footage in the room, divide the square footage by 22. This is the standard equation used in figuring the amount of paper that is needed. Now the following is a very important point to remember. Wallpaper is only manufactured and sold by the double roll, but it is figured for room measurement by the single roll. We have 320 square feet in the room we want to paper. We divide that number by 22 which gives us the figure of 14.545. This means that we will need 14.5 single rolls. You can't buy a half a roll of wall paper, so we round that out to 15 single rolls. We then divide the 15 by two remembering that wall coverings are only packaged and sold by the double roll. We get the figure of 7.5, so we round that out to eight double rolls that will be needed to wallpaper our room of 320 square feet. A standard non-commercial double roll of wallpaper is usually 20.5 inches wide by 32.8 feet in length. A rule that you can usually go by is that one double roll of paper will only make three runs on a normal 8 foot high wall due to the excess that has to be allowed at the top and bottom of each sheet. I've hung imported wallpaper that was 27 inches wide as well as some that was 30 inches wide, but the length has usually always been approximately the same. The usual 20.5 inch by 32.8 foot double roll contains 56 square feet in area. When using foreign wallpaper of different widths, you will need to figure the amount of paper needed via the square footage area of the advertised product. Source: suite101.com