Planning a tiled floor layout and material estimate
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Hi all. I've just created a short tutorial on how to plan a tiled floor using SketchUp. Hope some of you find it useful. The url for the full tutorial and images is http://www.sketchupuser.co.uk/planning-a-floor-tiling-project-with-sketchup/
Planning a floor tiling project with SketchUp
SketchUp’s easy to use tools can help you in all sorts of DIY tasks. One of the best is to get quick plans and estimates of materials. If you’re about to go and tile your bathroom floor, pave your driveway, or board your loft – wait a second – and follow this tutorial first. I promise it will save you hassle and time!
Step 01 – Draw your room
Using the Rectangle tool, click on the Origin (where the red, blue and green lines cross) and then draw a rectangle roughly the right size of your room, or area to be paved. Type in the dimension of the room (length, width) and hit Enter. The rectangle will resize.
Step 02 – Draw the obstructions
Now draw rectangles where the bath, toilet stem, basin stand, or any other obstruction are placed. Do this as roughly or accurately as you like.
Step 03 – Choose tiles and paint them onto the floor
Next go to the Paint Bucket tool. The Materials Pallet should appear. Go to Tiles on the dropdown list, and select some tiles that look approximately like the one’s you’re going to use. Paint onto the floor area.
Step 04 – Scale the tiles correctly
Of course, these tiles could be any size, so it’s important now to resize them accurately. Go to the Edit tab in the Materials pallet. At the top you can see a thumbnail image of the tiles. Note how many tiles wide the image is showing. In this case it is 4 tiles. The tiles we’re using in this project are 300mm wide, so 4 x 300 = 1200, with some gaps for spacers, say 1250mm. Type this figure into the width dimension box and hit Enter. Now the tiles on your floor resize correctly.
Step 05 – Arrange the tiles for best fit
From what little I know about tiling I gather that visually the best way to go is to center the tiles. You can do this now by Right Clicking on the floor, then select Texture ¦ Position. Now use the hand to move the tiles around on the floor. Easy peasy.
Step 06 – Display the total area of your floor
This bit is a piece of cake. Go to View ¦ Toolbars and make sure Construction is ticked. Then go to the Text button, select it, and click somewhere on your floor. Click somewhere else where you wish the text to be displayed. You will now have the area of your tiles, without any of the obstructions (bath etc.) factored in. If it’s in mm you can convert it to m by moving the decimal point 6 places to the left.
Step 07 – Find the tiling starting point
You’re going to want to start tiling in the middle, working your way out. So to find the measurement at the corner of your starting tile, click on the Tapemeasure tool. Click on the right hand wall, and move to the left. Settle the line at the edge of the centre tile as shown here. Now repeat with the perpendicular wall. You now have two lines crossing in the middle at the corner of your first tile. Use the Dimension tool to get the measurements. Hit Print, and go get ordering your tiles.
Now get to it. And don’t forget to wear kneepads!
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very nice.
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Thanks Kris. Hope it's useful.
I've just added the images inline for clarity.
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