Skirting & Architrave Calculator

This calculator works out how many lineal metres of skirting and architrave you need to trim a room in New Zealand, so you can order the right amount of moulding for a renovation, a new build or a single room refresh. Skirting boards run around the base of the walls where they meet the floor, while architrave frames the doorways, and both are sold and priced by the lineal metre, which makes the quantity easy to get wrong if you try to eyeball it. Buy too little and a second order may come from a different batch with a slightly different profile or paint finish; buy too much and you have offcuts and wasted spend. The skirting length is essentially the perimeter of the room, less the width of any doorways where the skirting stops, while the architrave depends on the number of doorways, with a standard single doorway needing roughly five metres to frame both sides and across the top. You enter the room length and width, the number of doorways, the architrave allowance per door, and a waste allowance to cover mitred corners, cutting and the odd mistake, and the calculator returns the skirting metres including waste, the bare perimeter, and the architrave metres. This gives you a clean order to take to the timber merchant. For rooms that are not simple rectangles, add up the wall lengths instead of using length times width, and remember that internal and external corners are mitred, which is where most of the waste comes from. Treat the result as a close estimate and round up to whole lengths when ordering.

Skirting stops at doorways. Standard single door needs about 5.2m of architrave. For odd shapes, add wall lengths. An estimate; round up to whole lengths.