How to Measure for a New Gym Floor Cover

Before ordering a new GymGuard gym floor cover, you’ll need to make a few choices and take some careful measurements. Today I’m going to walk you through everything you need to think about before placing your order by using this facility, West Chester University’s Hollinger Field House, as an example.

The first thing you need to do is decide what part of your floor you want to be able to cover, and then measure the length and width of that area. This is important, as it is not enough just to know the total square footage of the floor. Some things you may need to consider are:

• How much of your floor do you need to protect?
• Do you have retractable bleachers, and will you want your cover to fit the floor with them retracted, or only with them extended?
• Do you want your cover to go all the way to the walls, or just cover the athletic area of the gym?

Step 1: Measure the Full Area to be Covered

Here in Hollinger, we have a maple hardwood floor surrounded by a more durable and less valuable non-wood surface. We’re only concerned with carefully preserving the hardwood, so we aren’t going to worry about covering anything else. To make installation easy, we’ll include an extra foot or two on each side of the hardwood.

If your wood surface goes all the way to the walls, however, we still don’t necessarily recommend covering the whole thing. Applying a cover is much easier if a small amount of space is left around the borders of the room.

Should you want to go all the way to the wall, we recommend using a couple five foot wide runners running perpendicular to the other rolls to cover the ends and extend the cover right up to the base of the wall. If you do this, we’d suggest ordering the main 10 foot rolls five feet shorter than the full length of the floor.

Step 2: Plan to Cover Alcoves and Around Obstacles

Many facilities don’t have straight walls around the edge of the floor, much like this one. We tend not to recommend extending the cover all the way into the nooks and crannies, but if you feel you need to, runners the length of the distance between obstacles are the way to do it. Measure the full cover for the size of the floor within the obstacles, and then measure the length of each recess for additional 5 foot runners that fit within them.

Though we don’t have any here to demonstrate with, mid-floor obstacles like columns are dealt with in much the same way. Plan on covering only the area within the obstacles, and then measure for runners to cover the floor in between obstacles.

Step 3: Figure Out How Many Rolls of Gym Floor Cover You Need

Now that we have the full dimensions of the floor being covered, it’s time to figure out how many panels we’ll need. GymGuard floor covers generally come in 10 foot wide rolls, and can go up to 130 or 140 feet in length. In order to make installation and connecting of the individual rolls easy and secure, we suggest a minimum of 6 inches of overlap on each roll. We also suggest that rolls run lengthwise down the gym floor to minimize the number of separate pieces needed to cover the floor and the number of storage racks required. So in this case, we have a floor to cover of X feet by X feet, so we’re going to need X rolls of GymGuard cut to X feet.

This should give you enough information to determine how much GymGuard you’ll need to cover your gym floor, but if you have any other questions about the process, feel free to give our sales team a call at 800 445 6680. They’ll be happy to help.