Ordering Custom Flooring Accessories: Exactly What to Bring Us

Custom work has a reputation for being complicated. It isn't, but it does depend on getting a few things right at the start — and almost every delay we see traces back to the same handful of missing pieces.

Here's the complete checklist.

1. Your flooring material

Everything starts here. We don't approximate your floor, we cut from it, which means we need some of it — brought to the shop at 262 Poplar Hill Drive in northwest Calgary. We don't collect and we don't deliver, so this is the trip that matters.

How much:

| Piece | Roughly what it takes | | --- | --- | | Flush floor vent | One to two spare planks per vent | | Stair nosing | About one plank per tread | | Reducer | Depends on the opening width | | T-molding | Depends on the opening width |

Stair nosing is the one that surprises people. A full fourteen-tread staircase needs a meaningful amount of material — considerably more than most people set aside without being asked.

Where to look if you think you have none: the garage, the basement storage room, the crawlspace, the top of a closet, behind the furnace. Flooring offcuts get kept far more often than people remember. It is genuinely worth twenty minutes of looking before you conclude there are none.

If your floor is going in right now: tell your installer to leave the offcuts. Say it before the job, not on the last day. This one instruction prevents the single most common problem we deal with.

2. Your measurements

Take these carefully. This is the part that determines whether the finished piece fits.

Flush floor vents

Measure the opening in the subfloor, not the old vent cover. The cover overlaps the hole by roughly half an inch on each side, so measuring it gives you a number that's too big — and a vent built to it will fall through.

Lift the old register out and measure the hole itself: length and width.

Stair nosing

Measure every tread separately. Depth from the riser to the front edge, and width. Write them down in order from the top.

Stairs vary, particularly in older homes where the house has settled. Assuming they're identical is the most common cause of a set of nosings that mostly fit.

Also note your flooring thickness — or just bring an offcut and we'll measure it.

Reducers

• Full width of the opening, wall to wall
• Height difference: top of the higher floor to top of the lower floor

Measure the height difference when both floors are actually down, including underlay. If you're ordering in advance, tell us the specification of both floors and we'll work out the finished heights with you.

T-moldings

• Full width of the doorway
• Width of the expansion gap between the two floors

If you're not sure whether you need a reducer or a T-molding, we've written that up separately — it comes down to one measurement.

3. The flooring's brand and product name

Not essential, but genuinely useful. If you know the manufacturer and the product name — it's often printed on the box, or on the back of the planks themselves — tell us. It confirms the material we're working with and it helps if we ever need to source more.

4. Photos

Optional, and more useful than people expect. A photo of the transition, the staircase or the vent opening in place tells us things a measurement doesn't: how the space is used, what's on either side, whether there's something unusual about the situation.

Photos have caught more than one problem before it became an order.

5. Your timeline

Tell us when you need it. Most orders turn around within a week of your material reaching the shop, but larger jobs and unusual sizes take longer.

If your installer is booked for a specific date, say so up front. We'd much rather tell you at the start that a date is tight than have you find out at the end.

What happens next

1. You send us the details. Email, phone, or the order form — measurements, quantities and photos, before you drive anywhere.
2. We confirm everything. Quantities, dimensions, price and timing — in writing, before anything is cut. If a measurement looks wrong to us, we ask. That check has saved a lot of orders.
3. We make it. Milled, assembled and finished in our Calgary workshop.
4. You collect it, ready to install. Pick the finished pieces up from the shop. No sanding, no staining, no finishing work on site.

Nothing is cut until you've confirmed the quote. There's no risk in asking.

The four things that cause delays

Almost every held-up order traces back to one of these:

• Not enough material. Especially on staircases. Bring more than you think you need — a second trip across the city is nobody's idea of a good afternoon.
• The vent cover measured instead of the opening. Lift the old one out.
• Treads assumed identical. Measure each one.
• Height difference measured before both floors were finished. Measure at the end.

None of them are hard to avoid once you know about them.

Start here

Take your measurements and send them to us first — we'll confirm the job and the price before you make the trip. Then bring your offcuts to the shop at 262 Poplar Hill Drive, Calgary AB T3R 1C7, and collect the finished pieces from there. If anything on this list is unclear for your specific job, call us on 403-862-4161 and describe it — that's usually faster than working it out from a page.

We make flush vents, stair nosing, reducers and T-moldings for customers from Calgary and the surrounding area.