How to calculate your silk wallpaper requirements?

 

How much wallpaper do I need to buy?

To work out how much silk wallpaper you need to buy, first measure your wall(s) by the width and the height. Measure the height between the skirting and cornice, or to the ceiling if you have no cornice.

Say, for example, your wall is 4.10 metres wide and is 2.40m high.

Once you’ve found the wallpaper design you like, note the width and length (also known as the ‘drop’) of the roll and the pattern repeat.

For example, say you love our design Pop! in red from our Silk Interiors collection. This roll of wallpaper is:

 1.06m wide

15.5m long

with a pattern repeat of 26cm.

These are not standard sizes, though. Most silk wallpaper is 52cm x 10m and there is no standard pattern repeat.

How to calculate your wallpaper requirements

Step 1. Work out how many drops you need

So we know our wall is 4.10 metres wide and our wallpaper is 1.06 metres wide.

Divide the width of the wall by the width of the wallpaper.

In this instance 4.1 / 1.06 = 3.86

This tells us that we need 3 drops plus 0.8 of another drop so we’ll round it up to 4 drops. Let’s see how that works. 1.06m x 4 = 4.24m which means we’ll have an extra 14cm to cut from the final piece.

Step 2. Work out how long each drop needs to be

Now, let’s work out exactly how long each drop needs to be.

Our wall height is 2.40 metres. But we don’t want to cut each piece at 2.40 metres because we need to account for the pattern repeat. If you were to cut each piece at 2.40 metres, when you try to match the pattern when you hang the wallpaper, you’ll find that you’re unable to and it will be one big ugly and expensive mess.

So instead, divide the height of the wall by the height of the pattern repeat.

In this instance, 2.4 / 0.26 = 9.23

From this we know that we need at least 9.23 pattern repeats for each drop of wallpaper.  Let’s round that number up to 10 because whole numbers are so much easier to work with and we haven’t taken into account the trim we need at the top and the bottom.  Let’s see how this works.

10 (repeats) x 0.26m (pattern repeat) = 2.60 metres

Our wall is only 2.40 metres high so if we cut each piece at 2.60 metres, we allow for 10 pattern repeats per drop and we have plenty of trim for the top and bottom, which is great for when it’s time to match the pattern when hanging the wallpaper.

So, how much wallpaper do I need to buy for my feature wall?

Now we’re ready to work out how much wallpaper you need to buy.

We know that we need 4 widths of 2.6m in height.

4 x 2.6m = 10.4m of wallpaper

If we look at the size of the roll, it has a drop of 15.5m which means for this wall and with this pattern repeat, we only need one roll because my feature wall needs 10.4m.

Calculate wallpaper requirements using a standard wallpaper roll size

Say we have the same wall and pattern repeat measurements but the roll of wallpaper is 0.52m wide and has a drop of 10m. Let’s calculate how much wallpaper you will need.

In this instance, 4.10 / 0.52 = 7.88

We’ll round that up to 8. So you’ll need 8 silk wallpaper drops.

The wall height (2.40m) and pattern repeat (0.26) are the same so we know that we need to cut each drop at 2.60m. From here, let’s work out how many rolls of wallpaper we’ll need for this feature wall.

10 / 2.6 = 3.84

This means that we can only get a maximum of 3 drops from each roll. And we need 8 drops in total. This means we need three 0.53 metre x 10 metre rolls of silk wallpaper.

Got it?

If your brain is hurting, take a shortcut and check out our online wallpaper calculators. Save your brain and work out your wallpaper requirements within a few seconds.