Glossary
Plain-language definitions for the terms used throughout the tool.
- Wastage
- Extra tiles added on top of the bare minimum, to cover cuts, breakage, and pattern matching. It's worked out from the layout pattern chosen and the room's own size - not a fixed number - since a diagonal or herringbone pattern genuinely wastes more at the edges than a plain grid, and a small room wastes proportionally more than a large one at the same pattern.
- Sill height
- How high off the floor the bottom edge of a window or vent sits. Doors always start at floor level, so this only applies to windows and vents - and vents default to a different (higher) sill height than windows, since they typically sit higher on the wall.
- Obstruction allowance
- A small, fixed number of extra tiles added per floor fixture (a bath tub, a WC, and so on) that's been ticked. It's a flat count rather than a percentage, because cutting around a fixture is roughly the same amount of extra work regardless of how big the room around it is.
- Coverage type
- How high up a wall the tiling actually goes - full height, up to door height, half wall, splashback, or a custom height you type in yourself. See Adding rooms for a visual comparison of each.
- Layout pattern
- How the tiles are physically arranged when laid - a standard grid, offset/brick, diagonal, or herringbone. This is what drives the computed wastage percentage for a room. See Materials.
- Spare tiles
- The difference between the tiles a room actually needs and the number provided once that need is rounded up to whole boxes. Shown so there are no surprises about a few leftover tiles once the job is done.
- Batch
- A single production run of a tile. Tiles from different batches of the same product can differ slightly in shade - a difference that's often invisible tile by tile but noticeable once laid - and once a batch sells out, it usually can't be matched again. This is why every result recommends buying the full quantity for a job in one go.
- Edit code
- A short code generated once an estimate is registered (step 4). Enter it on the start page at any time to reopen that exact estimate and keep working on it - the proper way to save and return to a quote, as opposed to the browser-based "unfinished estimate" prompt, which only covers the period before an estimate has an edit code at all.
- Tile category (size band)
- Tile sizes are grouped into bands - small, medium, large, and extra-large - since several material calculations (like how much adhesive a tile size needs per bag, or the recommended grout joint depth) depend more on which size band a tile falls into than its exact millimetre dimensions.
- Grout joint width
- The gap left between tiles, filled with grout once the adhesive has set. Wider joints (around 5mm) suit rustic or handmade tile with uneven edges; narrower joints (around 2mm) suit precision-cut, rectified tile with straight, consistent edges.
- GST
- Goods and Services Tax - applied on top of the material subtotal in the pricing section, if you choose to enable it, at whatever rate applies to each material category.
- "How we calculated this"
- An expandable panel on the results page for each room, showing the exact figures - wall coverage, opening deductions, floor items, wastage - that produced that room's numbers. Always reflects what the estimate was actually calculated with, even if it's viewed again later after the underlying calculation has since been refined.