How does a free estimate work?

A free estimate is not a favor and it is not a sales move. It is a measurement job with a piece of arithmetic on the end of it. Once you know how that arithmetic gets built, you know exactly how much weight any number you are handed deserves, including ours.

The three inputs a written number is made from

An estimate has three inputs and no others. A product. A quantity. And the conditions in the room that the product has to be installed over. Everything else on a quote is arithmetic performed on those three. The mechanical question is where each one actually comes from, because that is the part that decides whether the number holds up a month later.

The product comes off the rack at the Wentzville showroom, because a line and a color carry a coverage per box and an installation method along with them. The quantity comes off your walls, taken room by room with a tape, with closets, alcoves and angled walls measured on their own rather than assumed from the room next door. The conditions come from what can be seen and felt underfoot once the loose rugs are up: wood or concrete underneath, how flat it sits, how sound it feels, what is down now, and what has to happen to that before anything new goes over it.

Change any one of the three and the total moves. That is the entire mechanism. It is also why the selection visit comes before the measure rather than after it, since two of the three inputs depend on knowing which floor you picked.

Why the inputs have to arrive in that order

The order is not arbitrary. Two of the three inputs hang off the first one. Coverage per box differs from line to line, so the quantity your rooms take is not settled until the product is. A glue down asks different things of a subfloor than a floating floor does, so what has to happen underneath is not settled either. Measure before the product is chosen and you have measured for a floor you may not buy.

That order is also why the work breaks into stages you can walk away from, and none of the three stages is charged for. The number you end up with is written against your rooms rather than rooms in general, which is the only reason it is worth setting beside anybody else's. What each line on that document represents is a question of its own, and worth reading before you sit down with anyone's paperwork.

The failure mode: a number written before the room was seen

Here is where estimates go wrong. A figure quoted over the phone, off a price list, or as a rate per square foot has one of the three inputs at best. The product might be real. The quantity is a guess taken from your description of the room. The conditions are not in the number at all, because nobody looked.

Two rooms that measure identically can be very different jobs once you account for what is already down, how flat the subfloor is, how many doorways meet other flooring, and whether there are stairs. Those factors are argued in full on our page about what decides a quote, and none of them can be established at a distance. A room that is already bare is not the same job as one with old tile bonded to the slab, and the difference does not show up in the square footage.

The same limit applies to arithmetic done online. Our own flooring calculator will tell you how much material a room takes, and it is genuinely useful for that. It cannot tell you what your subfloor is doing, which is a different question with a different answer.

How to test any estimate you are given, ours included

You do not need trade knowledge to check an estimate. You need to know which of the three inputs it was built from, and five questions get you there.

• Which stage produced this number? A conversation, a measure, or neither.
• Did somebody physically stand in the rooms and look at the subfloor, or was the square footage taken from what I told them?
• What quantity is this written against, and does it include the waste the layout carries?
• What happens to this number if what is under the old floor is not what we expect?
• Which lines change if I switch to a different product, and by roughly how much?

An estimate that survives all five was built from a room. One that does not is a placeholder with a decimal point in it, and the gap between the two turns up later rather than never.

Where the estimate ends and an order begins

The estimate stops at your approval. Nothing gets ordered before that, which is the gate that keeps a quote from quietly becoming a purchase. What follows the yes is a separate sequence, and the order it runs in is set out on our installation process page.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this, the useful next move is the one that fills in the missing input. Pick the product at the showroom, then let us come and read the room. Call 636-332-0654.