Same Kenmore job as the quote template article, taken apart properly: three bedrooms and a hall, 376 square feet of existing oak to refinish, one patch of floor past saving, and baseboard that has to come off.
What you measure, and what you do not
Refinishing is priced on the floor area you will actually sand. That is the room area minus anything permanently fixed to the floor — built-in cabinetry, a hearth, a kitchen island. It is not minus the furniture, because the furniture moves.
Baseboard is priced on the room perimeter, less door openings. Measuring it with a wheel around the room and subtracting the doors takes two minutes and is more accurate than the estimate you will otherwise make from the floor area.
The materials line is not the install line
Look at the last two rows. The install is 49 square feet; the material ordered is 65. That is about 33% waste on a small patch, which sounds absurd next to the 5–10% you would carry on a whole floor — and it is correct.
Small patches waste more, because you are matching a run direction and a board length into an existing field, and every cut that does not match goes in the bin. Quote the waste on the material line where the client can see it, never buried in the install rate.
Where estimators lose money on flooring
Stairs are the expensive one. A flight of thirteen treads and risers is a day of careful work and almost no square footage; priced by area it is nearly free, and it is the single most common way a flooring job goes upside down.
Say what you did not look under
You cannot see the subfloor through a finished floor. Write that down, put a rate against the repair — $11 a square foot on this job — and the day the crew finds a soft spot you are writing a change order instead of having an argument.
On this job that is exactly what happened: 62 square feet of soft subfloor under the hall, $682 plus tax, approved before the work continued.
