Over the years, flooring installers have had to get used to different units of measurement.

Old timers in the industry will still remember using the imperial system and recording their measurements in feet (ft) and inches (in).

In the 1970s, when the metric system was introduced into Australia, installers changed to centimetres (cm) as the unit of measure for floor coverings, because it was the standard adopted by the textiles industry.

Now things are beginning to change again. The latest Australian Standard for resilient floor coverings (AS 1884-2012) specifies millimetres (mm) as the unit of measure.

This move is designed to bring floor coverings into line with the other building trades.

If you know the history of these changes, you can understand why flooring installers need to have some knowledge of all three units of measure.

For example, floor coverings imported from America or Asia are still manufactured in imperial widths, such as 6 feet or 12 feet. When they arrive in Australia, they are often re-sold in their metric-equivalent lengths, such as 183 cm (6 ft) or 366 cm (12 ft).

On the other hand, materials imported from Europe are made in standard metric widths, such as 2 metres (200 cm) and 3 metres (300 cm).

Australian made materials are manufactured both ways, depending on the company producing the products.

Recording measurements on-site

In practice, all measurements are recorded in metric units.

Most flooring installers still use centimetres, because that's the way it's been done for the last 40 years.

However, if the installer picks up a building plan to check the internal room measurements, they need to remember that the dimensions will be shown in millimetres and do a conversion in their head as they read off the numbers.

In this unit, we'll use millimetres in our discussions on floor covering plans, because that brings us into line with the latest Australian Standard for resilient floor installations.

But it's worth remembering that the Australian/New Zealand Standard for textile floor coverings (AS/NZS 2455) was last updated in 2007, so it still specifies centimetres as the unit of measure for floor covering plans.

This is likely to change to millimetres in the next update.