2. Adding rooms
Add every room that needs tiling, with the details that actually affect the numbers.
Room dimensions
Length, width, and height, all in feet. Floor and wall tiling are separate toggles - a kitchen might only need floor tiling, a bathroom usually needs both, and a hallway might need neither in a particular job. Tick only what actually needs tiling; leaving wall tiling off for a room means it's skipped entirely from every material calculation for that room.
Wall coverage - how high the tiles go
If wall tiling is on, you choose how far up the wall it goes. This matters more than it might seem - the difference between tiling to door height and tiling the full wall can easily be a third of the wall's area.
A splashback only tiles the strip directly above a counter - not the whole wall from the floor up to that height. The wall hidden behind the counter and cabinets below it is correctly left out of the calculation, since nothing is actually being tiled there.
Wall tiling is set to "Up to door height" (7 ft). The room's perimeter is 2 × (8 + 6) = 28 ft, so the gross wall area is 28 × 7 = 196 sq ft.
A 3 ft × 7 ft door deducts the full 21 sq ft, since it reaches exactly as high as the tiled band. A 3 ft × 4 ft window with a 3 ft sill deducts 3 × 4 = 12 sq ft (its sill sits at 3 ft, its top at 7 ft, and both fall inside the tiled band). Together, that's 33 sq ft deducted, leaving a net wall area of 163 sq ft.
On the floor, the gross area is 8 × 6 = 48 sq ft. A bath tub, ticked as a floor item at its default 5.5 × 2.5 ft, removes 13.75 sq ft - leaving a tileable floor area of 34.25 sq ft, before any tile size or wastage is even chosen. See Materials for how this same room's numbers continue into an actual tile count.
Doors, windows, and vents
Every opening in a wall reduces how much of that wall actually needs tiling, so the more accurately these are entered, the more accurate the wall tile count is. For each one, you enter its width, height, and - for windows and vents - how high its bottom edge (the sill) sits off the floor.
- Doors always start at floor level, so there's no sill height to enter for them.
- Windows default to a sill height of 3 ft if you don't set one - a reasonable estimate for a typical window, but change it if you know the real number.
- Vents default separately, to 6 ft - vents typically sit much higher than windows, so they get their own default rather than sharing the window one.
Only the part of an opening that actually overlaps the tiled band gets deducted. A door against a splashback, for instance, sits entirely below the tiled band and correctly deducts nothing at all.
What's on the floor that won't be tiled under
Fixtures like a bath tub, a WC, or a run of kitchen base units take up floor space that doesn't get tiled. Ticking these reduces the tileable floor area to match, and adds a small fixed allowance for the extra cutting involved in tiling around an obstruction - a fixed amount per item, since cutting around a fixture is roughly the same amount of extra work whether the room is small or large.
The list shown here changes based on the room type - a kitchen shows kitchen-relevant items, a bathroom shows bathroom-relevant ones. There's always a "something else" option too, for anything that doesn't fit a preset.
Presets and duplicating a room
If you're estimating a typical home, the "Use a preset" option can add a full set of standard rooms (a 1BHK, 2BHK, or 3BHK layout) in one go, which you can then edit individually. Switching to a different preset asks you to confirm first, then replaces only the rooms that preset itself added - anything you added by hand is never touched, and never part of what gets removed.
For a room very similar to one you've already added - a second identical bedroom, for instance - the "Duplicate" option on any room copies it instantly, with the name automatically numbered so you don't end up with two rooms sharing an identical name by accident.