How to Measure Countertops for a Quote (Portland, OR)
How to Measure Countertops for a Quote (Portland, OR)
How to Measure Countertops for a Quote (Portland, OR)
What You Need Before You Start
What You Need Before You Start
You need three things: a 25-foot tape measure, a pencil and paper (not your phone's notes app, you want to sketch), and about fifteen minutes. A helper is nice for long runs but not required if you hook the tape on the cabinet edge.
Start by drawing your kitchen from above. It does not need to be pretty or to scale. Draw the counter runs as rectangles and label each one: "sink run," "stove run," "island," "peninsula." Most Portland kitchens break into two to four of these shapes. A galley kitchen in a Sellwood bungalow is usually two rectangles. A remodeled open-plan in Happy Valley or Camas is often three plus an island.
One rule that saves people a lot of confusion: measure the cabinets, not the old countertop. Your existing tops may have been cut wrong, may have a different overhang than what you want, or may be a material with a different standard depth. The cabinet boxes are the truth. You will add overhang back in as a fixed number, which we cover below.
While you are down there, note your cabinet depth. Standard base cabinets in the US are 24 inches deep. If yours measure 21 or 27, write it down, because that changes your finished counter depth and your total square footage along with it.
The Things That Change the Price After the Square Footage
The Things That Change the Price After the Square Footage
Square footage gets you most of the way. These are the items that move the final number up or down, and they are worth knowing before you compare two quotes and wonder why they differ.
Edge profile. Edges are priced by linear foot of finished edge, not by square foot of top. A standard eased or pencil edge is usually included. Ogee, dupont, mitered, and built-up edges cost more because they take more machine time and more hand polishing. Measure your total exposed edge length while you have the tape out. The edge profile guide shows what each one looks like and where the cost breaks are.
Sink and cooktop cutouts. Every cutout is a labor operation. An undermount sink cutout requires the opening to be cut, then the inside of that opening polished, because with an undermount you see and touch the stone edge. A drop-in sink hides the edge and costs less to cut. Count your cutouts: one sink, maybe a prep sink in the island, one cooktop if it is not a slide-in range, and faucet or soap dispenser holes. Sink options and how each one affects fabrication is covered in its own post.
Backsplash. A 4-inch stone backsplash is priced by linear foot and is cut from the same slab, so it pulls from your yield. A full-height slab backsplash is a different animal: you are adding real square footage, often 20 to 30 more, and it frequently pushes a job from one slab to two. Decide this before you price, not after.
Slab yield and seams. This is the one that surprises people. Stone comes in slabs, typically around 120 x 55 inches for quartz and variable for natural stone. Your 58 square foot kitchen does not get cut from 58 square feet of slab. It gets cut from whole slabs, with waste around the cutouts and the corners, so the real yield on a slab is closer to 70 percent of its face area. That is why a kitchen at 58 square feet and a kitchen at 66 square feet can both need two slabs and price nearly the same, while a jump from 66 to 72 can push you to a third. Where the seams land is a design decision as much as a cost one, which the seam placement guide walks through.
Material level. The same 58 square feet in an entry-level quartz and in an exotic natural quartzite are not remotely the same number. If you have not settled on material yet, quartz versus granite is the first fork, and how to choose a slab covers what to look at once you are standing in front of them.
Thickness. 3cm is the Portland standard and carries itself without plywood substrate. 2cm costs less per square foot but generally needs support and a laminated edge to look right, which gives back much of the savings. The 2cm versus 3cm breakdown has the full comparison.
The Actual Math: Length x Depth, Then Add Overhang
The Actual Math: Length x Depth, Then Add Overhang
For each rectangle on your sketch, measure the length along the wall and use 25.5 inches as your depth for any run against a wall. That number is not arbitrary: 24 inches of cabinet plus a standard 1.5 inch front overhang. If you want a deeper overhang, use your number instead.
Then convert. Multiply length in inches by depth in inches, and divide by 144 to get square feet.
A worked example from a real Portland kitchen layout:
Sink run: 112 in x 25.5 in = 2,856 sq in / 144 = 19.8 sq ft
Stove run: 84 in x 25.5 in = 2,142 sq in / 144 = 14.9 sq ft
Island: 84 in x 40 in = 3,360 sq in / 144 = 23.3 sq ft
Total: 58 square feet. That is a very typical mid-size Portland kitchen, and it lands right in the middle of what we see day to day. Small galley kitchens run 25 to 35 square feet. Large open-plan kitchens with a big island and a butler's pantry can hit 90 to 110.
Islands are measured differently. An island usually has overhang on all four sides, or at minimum a seating overhang on one long side. Measure the cabinet box, then add your overhangs: typically 1.5 inches on the back and ends, and 10 to 12 inches on the seating side so knees fit. That seating overhang is why islands eat square footage faster than people expect, and past 10 inches of unsupported stone you are into corbels or steel brackets, which is a real line item. If you are still deciding on island treatment, the waterfall island guide explains what the dropped-panel look adds in both slab and labor.
Do not double-count corners. Where two runs meet in an L, the corner square belongs to one run or the other, not both. The simplest fix is to measure one run wall-to-wall and the second run only from the edge of the first run outward. Double-counting a corner adds roughly 4.5 square feet to your estimate, which at Portland pricing is real money on a number you are using to make a decision.
Five Mistakes That Blow Up a Self-Measure
We see the same handful of errors over and over. None of them are hard to avoid once you know to look.
1. Measuring the old top instead of the cabinets. Covered above, but it is the most common by a wide margin. Old tops frequently have a 1-inch or even zero overhang, or were scribed to a wavy wall and are narrower than the cabinet at one end.
2. Forgetting the overhang entirely. A 24-inch depth instead of 25.5 across three runs of a mid-size kitchen undercounts you by about 3 square feet. Not fatal for budgeting, but it stacks with other errors.
3. Ignoring the appliance gaps. A slide-in range sits in a gap with countertop on both sides, and that gap is not countertop. A cooktop, by contrast, drops into continuous countertop, so the stone runs right through and gets a cutout. Look at what you actually have, or plan to have. Getting this backwards can swing your number by 8 to 10 square feet.
4. Assuming your walls are square. They are not. Portland's older housing stock, and honestly plenty of new construction too, has walls out of square by a half inch or more over a run. Your tape measure will not catch it and does not need to, because templating will. Just do not be surprised when the final template number differs from yours by a square foot or two.
5. Measuring a kitchen that does not exist yet. If you are in a full remodel and the cabinets are not installed, you are measuring a plan, not a room. That is perfectly fine for budgeting, and cabinet shop drawings are usually more accurate than a tape measure anyway. Just know the number firms up when the boxes are set and level, because tops are templated after cabinet install, never before. The installation process walkthrough lays out where templating falls in the sequence and what has to be done before we can come out.
Square Footage Is the Number That Drives Your Quote
Almost every countertop conversation in Portland starts the same way: "About how much is this going to run me?" And almost every honest answer starts with a question back: how many square feet are we covering?
Square footage is the single number that drives a countertop quote. Material is priced by the square foot, fabrication labor scales with it, and nearly every other line on the estimate, from edge profile footage to sink cutouts, is anchored to the layout that produced that number. If you can measure your own kitchen reasonably well, you can get a realistic price range in a few minutes instead of waiting on a showroom appointment to find out whether the project is even in your budget.
To be clear about what this article is and is not: this is a budgeting measurement, not a fabrication measurement. When Alpine Stones actually builds your tops, we send a technician out with a laser templating system that captures your cabinets to within a fraction of a millimeter, including the out-of-square walls that every Portland house built before 1990 seems to have. Nothing you do with a tape measure replaces that. What your tape measure does is get you a number good enough to price the job, compare options, and decide whether you are doing quartz or granite before anyone drives to your house.
Here is how to do it properly, what people consistently get wrong, and how to turn the result into an actual number.
Square Footage Is the Number That Drives Your Quote
Almost every countertop conversation in Portland starts the same way: "About how much is this going to run me?" And almost every honest answer starts with a question back: how many square feet are we covering?
Square footage is the single number that drives a countertop quote. Material is priced by the square foot, fabrication labor scales with it, and nearly every other line on the estimate, from edge profile footage to sink cutouts, is anchored to the layout that produced that number. If you can measure your own kitchen reasonably well, you can get a realistic price range in a few minutes instead of waiting on a showroom appointment to find out whether the project is even in your budget.
To be clear about what this article is and is not: this is a budgeting measurement, not a fabrication measurement. When Alpine Stones actually builds your tops, we send a technician out with a laser templating system that captures your cabinets to within a fraction of a millimeter, including the out-of-square walls that every Portland house built before 1990 seems to have. Nothing you do with a tape measure replaces that. What your tape measure does is get you a number good enough to price the job, compare options, and decide whether you are doing quartz or granite before anyone drives to your house.
Here is how to do it properly, what people consistently get wrong, and how to turn the result into an actual number.
Turning Your Number Into an Actual Price
Once you have square footage, you have everything you need to get a real quote instead of a vague range.
Alpine Stones runs a free online quote tool where you enter your square footage, pick a material and color, add your cutouts and edge, and get pricing back immediately. No appointment, no salesperson, no waiting for a callback. You can run it three times with three different materials and see exactly what the upgrade costs, which is the thing most homeowners actually want to know and rarely get told plainly.
It is worth saying why we do it this way. We fabricate 100 percent of our work in our own Portland shop on a Breton CNC. We are not marking up someone else's fabrication, so we are not protecting a spread by keeping prices vague. The number the tool gives you is the number.
A few notes on using it well. Enter your total square footage across all runs including the island, not per-run. Round up rather than down, since stone is bought in whole slabs and it is better to be pleasantly surprised. Price your realistic material first, then run the upgrade you are curious about, because the delta between them is the decision you are actually making. And if you are comparing a full-height backsplash against a 4-inch, run it both ways, since that is where yield jumps.
If your project is commercial, or a multi-unit build, or a trade account, the self-serve tool is not the right path. Commercial and multi-unit work gets quoted directly because the variables are different: lead times, staging, phased installs, and volume pricing. Builders, cabinet shops and designers with an Alpine partner account should use the partner portal, which shows the same catalog with the account discount applied.
Not sure what your budget should even look like before you start? The Portland and Vancouver WA cost guide covers what real projects land at in this market, and remnants are worth a look if your project is small, like a bathroom vanity or a laundry room, where a full slab makes no sense.
Measure It, Price It, Then Come See Slabs
Fifteen minutes with a tape measure turns "I have no idea what this costs" into a real number you can plan around. Sketch your runs, measure the cabinets, use 25.5 inches of depth against walls, add your island overhangs, do not double-count corners, and divide by 144.
Then run your numbers through our free instant quote tool and see actual pricing on the materials you are considering. It takes about two minutes and nobody calls you unless you ask them to.
When you are ready to see slabs in person, our Portland showroom is by appointment so you get the space and the time to look properly. Call (503) 837-1980 to book.
Alpine Stones
5512 NE 105th Ave, Portland, OR 97220
(503) 837-1980
CCB# 223660
Terms & Conditions
CCB#: 223660
COPYRIGHT 2025 ALPINE STONES, INC
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RESOURCES
STAY CONNECTED
Mon-Fri / 9am-4pm
CCB#: 223660
COPYRIGHT 2025 ALPINE STONES, INC
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Terms & Conditions
CCB#: 223660
COPYRIGHT 2025 ALPINE STONES, INC
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RESOURCES
STAY CONNECTED
Mon-Fri / 9am-4pm
Terms & Conditions
CCB#: 223660
COPYRIGHT 2025 ALPINE STONES, INC
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RESOURCES
STAY CONNECTED
Mon-Fri / 9am-4pm
Measure It, Price It, Then Come See Slabs
Fifteen minutes with a tape measure turns "I have no idea what this costs" into a real number you can plan around. Sketch your runs, measure the cabinets, use 25.5 inches of depth against walls, add your island overhangs, do not double-count corners, and divide by 144.
Then run your numbers through our free instant quote tool and see actual pricing on the materials you are considering. It takes about two minutes and nobody calls you unless you ask them to.
When you are ready to see slabs in person, our Portland showroom is by appointment so you get the space and the time to look properly. Call (503) 837-1980 to book.
Alpine Stones
5512 NE 105th Ave, Portland, OR 97220
(503) 837-1980
CCB# 223660
Turning Your Number Into an Actual Price
Once you have square footage, you have everything you need to get a real quote instead of a vague range.
Alpine Stones runs a free online quote tool where you enter your square footage, pick a material and color, add your cutouts and edge, and get pricing back immediately. No appointment, no salesperson, no waiting for a callback. You can run it three times with three different materials and see exactly what the upgrade costs, which is the thing most homeowners actually want to know and rarely get told plainly.
It is worth saying why we do it this way. We fabricate 100 percent of our work in our own Portland shop on a Breton CNC. We are not marking up someone else's fabrication, so we are not protecting a spread by keeping prices vague. The number the tool gives you is the number.
A few notes on using it well. Enter your total square footage across all runs including the island, not per-run. Round up rather than down, since stone is bought in whole slabs and it is better to be pleasantly surprised. Price your realistic material first, then run the upgrade you are curious about, because the delta between them is the decision you are actually making. And if you are comparing a full-height backsplash against a 4-inch, run it both ways, since that is where yield jumps.
If your project is commercial, or a multi-unit build, or a trade account, the self-serve tool is not the right path. Commercial and multi-unit work gets quoted directly because the variables are different: lead times, staging, phased installs, and volume pricing. Builders, cabinet shops and designers with an Alpine partner account should use the partner portal, which shows the same catalog with the account discount applied.
Not sure what your budget should even look like before you start? The Portland and Vancouver WA cost guide covers what real projects land at in this market, and remnants are worth a look if your project is small, like a bathroom vanity or a laundry room, where a full slab makes no sense.
Measure It, Price It, Then Come See Slabs
Fifteen minutes with a tape measure turns "I have no idea what this costs" into a real number you can plan around. Sketch your runs, measure the cabinets, use 25.5 inches of depth against walls, add your island overhangs, do not double-count corners, and divide by 144.
Then run your numbers through our free instant quote tool and see actual pricing on the materials you are considering. It takes about two minutes and nobody calls you unless you ask them to.
When you are ready to see slabs in person, our Portland showroom is by appointment so you get the space and the time to look properly. Call (503) 837-1980 to book.
Alpine Stones
5512 NE 105th Ave, Portland, OR 97220
(503) 837-1980
CCB# 223660
The Actual Math: Length x Depth, Then Add Overhang
For each rectangle on your sketch, measure the length along the wall and use 25.5 inches as your depth for any run against a wall. That number is not arbitrary: 24 inches of cabinet plus a standard 1.5 inch front overhang. If you want a deeper overhang, use your number instead.
Then convert. Multiply length in inches by depth in inches, and divide by 144 to get square feet.
A worked example from a real Portland kitchen layout:
Sink run: 112 in x 25.5 in = 2,856 sq in / 144 = 19.8 sq ft
Stove run: 84 in x 25.5 in = 2,142 sq in / 144 = 14.9 sq ft
Island: 84 in x 40 in = 3,360 sq in / 144 = 23.3 sq ft
Total: 58 square feet. That is a very typical mid-size Portland kitchen, and it lands right in the middle of what we see day to day. Small galley kitchens run 25 to 35 square feet. Large open-plan kitchens with a big island and a butler's pantry can hit 90 to 110.
Islands are measured differently. An island usually has overhang on all four sides, or at minimum a seating overhang on one long side. Measure the cabinet box, then add your overhangs: typically 1.5 inches on the back and ends, and 10 to 12 inches on the seating side so knees fit. That seating overhang is why islands eat square footage faster than people expect, and past 10 inches of unsupported stone you are into corbels or steel brackets, which is a real line item. If you are still deciding on island treatment, the waterfall island guide explains what the dropped-panel look adds in both slab and labor.
Do not double-count corners. Where two runs meet in an L, the corner square belongs to one run or the other, not both. The simplest fix is to measure one run wall-to-wall and the second run only from the edge of the first run outward. Double-counting a corner adds roughly 4.5 square feet to your estimate, which at Portland pricing is real money on a number you are using to make a decision.
The Things That Change the Price After the Square Footage
Square footage gets you most of the way. These are the items that move the final number up or down, and they are worth knowing before you compare two quotes and wonder why they differ.
Edge profile. Edges are priced by linear foot of finished edge, not by square foot of top. A standard eased or pencil edge is usually included. Ogee, dupont, mitered, and built-up edges cost more because they take more machine time and more hand polishing. Measure your total exposed edge length while you have the tape out. The edge profile guide shows what each one looks like and where the cost breaks are.
Sink and cooktop cutouts. Every cutout is a labor operation. An undermount sink cutout requires the opening to be cut, then the inside of that opening polished, because with an undermount you see and touch the stone edge. A drop-in sink hides the edge and costs less to cut. Count your cutouts: one sink, maybe a prep sink in the island, one cooktop if it is not a slide-in range, and faucet or soap dispenser holes. Sink options and how each one affects fabrication is covered in its own post.
Backsplash. A 4-inch stone backsplash is priced by linear foot and is cut from the same slab, so it pulls from your yield. A full-height slab backsplash is a different animal: you are adding real square footage, often 20 to 30 more, and it frequently pushes a job from one slab to two. Decide this before you price, not after.
Slab yield and seams. This is the one that surprises people. Stone comes in slabs, typically around 120 x 55 inches for quartz and variable for natural stone. Your 58 square foot kitchen does not get cut from 58 square feet of slab. It gets cut from whole slabs, with waste around the cutouts and the corners, so the real yield on a slab is closer to 70 percent of its face area. That is why a kitchen at 58 square feet and a kitchen at 66 square feet can both need two slabs and price nearly the same, while a jump from 66 to 72 can push you to a third. Where the seams land is a design decision as much as a cost one, which the seam placement guide walks through.
Material level. The same 58 square feet in an entry-level quartz and in an exotic natural quartzite are not remotely the same number. If you have not settled on material yet, quartz versus granite is the first fork, and how to choose a slab covers what to look at once you are standing in front of them.
Thickness. 3cm is the Portland standard and carries itself without plywood substrate. 2cm costs less per square foot but generally needs support and a laminated edge to look right, which gives back much of the savings. The 2cm versus 3cm breakdown has the full comparison.
Five Mistakes That Blow Up a Self-Measure
We see the same handful of errors over and over. None of them are hard to avoid once you know to look.
1. Measuring the old top instead of the cabinets. Covered above, but it is the most common by a wide margin. Old tops frequently have a 1-inch or even zero overhang, or were scribed to a wavy wall and are narrower than the cabinet at one end.
2. Forgetting the overhang entirely. A 24-inch depth instead of 25.5 across three runs of a mid-size kitchen undercounts you by about 3 square feet. Not fatal for budgeting, but it stacks with other errors.
3. Ignoring the appliance gaps. A slide-in range sits in a gap with countertop on both sides, and that gap is not countertop. A cooktop, by contrast, drops into continuous countertop, so the stone runs right through and gets a cutout. Look at what you actually have, or plan to have. Getting this backwards can swing your number by 8 to 10 square feet.
4. Assuming your walls are square. They are not. Portland's older housing stock, and honestly plenty of new construction too, has walls out of square by a half inch or more over a run. Your tape measure will not catch it and does not need to, because templating will. Just do not be surprised when the final template number differs from yours by a square foot or two.
5. Measuring a kitchen that does not exist yet. If you are in a full remodel and the cabinets are not installed, you are measuring a plan, not a room. That is perfectly fine for budgeting, and cabinet shop drawings are usually more accurate than a tape measure anyway. Just know the number firms up when the boxes are set and level, because tops are templated after cabinet install, never before. The installation process walkthrough lays out where templating falls in the sequence and what has to be done before we can come out.
Turning Your Number Into an Actual Price
Once you have square footage, you have everything you need to get a real quote instead of a vague range.
Alpine Stones runs a free online quote tool where you enter your square footage, pick a material and color, add your cutouts and edge, and get pricing back immediately. No appointment, no salesperson, no waiting for a callback. You can run it three times with three different materials and see exactly what the upgrade costs, which is the thing most homeowners actually want to know and rarely get told plainly.
It is worth saying why we do it this way. We fabricate 100 percent of our work in our own Portland shop on a Breton CNC. We are not marking up someone else's fabrication, so we are not protecting a spread by keeping prices vague. The number the tool gives you is the number.
A few notes on using it well. Enter your total square footage across all runs including the island, not per-run. Round up rather than down, since stone is bought in whole slabs and it is better to be pleasantly surprised. Price your realistic material first, then run the upgrade you are curious about, because the delta between them is the decision you are actually making. And if you are comparing a full-height backsplash against a 4-inch, run it both ways, since that is where yield jumps.
If your project is commercial, or a multi-unit build, or a trade account, the self-serve tool is not the right path. Commercial and multi-unit work gets quoted directly because the variables are different: lead times, staging, phased installs, and volume pricing. Builders, cabinet shops and designers with an Alpine partner account should use the partner portal, which shows the same catalog with the account discount applied.
Not sure what your budget should even look like before you start? The Portland and Vancouver WA cost guide covers what real projects land at in this market, and remnants are worth a look if your project is small, like a bathroom vanity or a laundry room, where a full slab makes no sense.