Baseboard and trim, in linear feet
Base is the perimeter less the doors. Not less the windows — and subtracting those is the second commonest arithmetic error in a takeoff. It always goes short.
What comes off, and what does not
A door interrupts the base and a cased opening interrupts the base. A window does not: the run carries on underneath it, and taking windows off is how a trim order arrives short on a room with a lot of glass.
On a room 12' × 14' with a 8' ceiling, one 3' × 6' 8" door and one 3' × 5' window: 52.00 lf of perimeter, 3.00 lf out for the door, 49.00 lf of base. The window changes nothing.
Sticks are not linear feet
49.00 lf in 16 ft lengths is 4 sticks by division, and division is all a calculator can do here. Where the joins land, how many scarfs the walls force and what every mitre eats are decisions made against the wall, and no room’s geometry knows any of them.
Which is why the stick count on this page is optional and why the number that matters is the run. Order against the run and your own habit; use the stick count as a sanity check on what comes off the truck.
Long walls are where the count and reality part company. A 22 ft wall in 16 ft stock is two pieces and a scarf joint whichever way you cut it, and the division does not know the wall was 22 ft.
The same run prices four different things
Base, shoe, cap and any other run that follows the floor all come off the same number. Crown does not — crown follows the ceiling line, which includes the door openings the base skips, so it is the perimeter rather than the base run.
| Run | Follows | Doors deducted? |
|---|---|---|
| Baseboard | the floor line | Yes |
| Shoe or quarter round | the base | Yes |
| Chair rail | the wall, at height | Yes — it stops at a cased opening |
| Crown | the ceiling line | No — it runs over the door |
That is why the calculator prints the perimeter beside the base run rather than only the answer: 52.00 lf and 49.00 lf price different trades, and a sheet with one number on it will eventually be used for the wrong one.
Getting the perimeter honestly
A perimeter four inches out over four walls moves the base run by a third of a stick, which nobody notices until the last wall. Trueline measures the room and then says, on every document, whether a tape has been on the walls the number came from — which is the only part of this that a calculator cannot do for you.
Questions people ask
- Do you subtract windows from a baseboard measurement?
- No. Baseboard runs underneath a window, so the window changes nothing about the run. Doors and cased openings do interrupt it and both come off. Subtracting windows is the commonest way a trim order comes up short.
- How do I work out linear feet of baseboard for a room?
- Add up the walls to get the perimeter, then take off the width of every door and every cased opening. That is the run. Sticks come after, from the run and whatever stock length you are buying, rounded up.
- Does the stick count allow for mitres and joins?
- It cannot. It is the run divided by the stock length and rounded up. How many pieces a room really takes depends on where the joins land and what each mitre eats, and those are decisions made at the wall rather than facts about the room.
- Is crown moulding the same measurement?
- No — crown follows the ceiling line, so it runs straight over the door openings that the baseboard stops at. Crown is the perimeter; base is the perimeter less the doors. This calculator prints both.
This is the app’s arithmetic, not a copy of it
The figures above are not worked out by anything written for this page. The form hands what you typed to Trueline’s own measuring engine — the same modules the iPhone app runs — and prints what comes back. Lengths are held as whole nanometres and money as whole cents, so there is no floating-point number anywhere in a measurement, here or in the app.
The one thing a web form cannot do is know whether anybody put a tape on the wall. That is the whole of the difference between this page and the app it comes out of: Trueline carries where every length came from — scanned, drawn or measured — onto the drawing, the takeoff and the proposal a client reads. You can also take the blank forms and use them with whatever you already have.