Skirtings and architraves

Hi,

I'm doing a refurbishment project and will be replaing all of the skirtings and architraves, as I don't like the existing ones.

Once I've chosen what I want, I'll need to come up with a a list of quantities.

I'm assuming that for the architraves, I just count the number of doors and the supplier will provide the right number of door sets (1 7ft and 1 10ft?).

However, I'm not sure how to go about providing the quantities for the skirtings. Is it normal to measure and list every single length or is there an estimation method (e.g. measure the perimeter of every room, take off the door widths and add x% for offcuts/errors)?

Or does the average 3 bedroom house have a standard amount +/- x%?

Thanks in advance

Jever

What I tend to do is firstly check out what sort of lengths are stocked by your supplier . With that knowledge i then to try to see how the room sizes will tie in with that. For example if the supplier stocks 3.6 m lengths and a room is say 3m square then that counts as 4 lengths so avoiding any joints along the run of the wall. The 4 600mm "off cuts" I then see if I can use up around chimney breasts , short runs between doors and similar positions. Hope that makes sense.

I would measure and make a cutting list of all the pieces you will require, find out what lengths your supplier stocks, then calculate how many lengths you need, using this excellent program:

http://jonathan.overholt.org/projects/cutlist

Since finding it, I've used it several times and it works well (pretend the inches are millimetres).

Cheers
Richard

Having done the exact same thing recently (and seeing some builders botching it up on the ground floor), I would also advise to measure the room length and try to get the right lengths so you don't need to join two pieces together for a wall. The measurements do not need to be accurate and it should not be a time consuming job.

One piece of advice I would give is to take care when you remove the old architraves so as not to damage the existing door frames as it might be difficult locating ones that have the same depth; depending on how the architraves were fixed to the frame, this might not be as straightforward as you think and a multi-tool would do wonders here.