Labor Hours Calculator
Hour estimates go wrong in a consistent direction: people price the visible work and forget the invisible work. Rolling a wall or laying a floor is the part you can picture, so it is the part that gets estimated, and…
Tool Category Home Improvement
Planning calculators for every stage of a home improvement job: measuring rooms and surfaces, working out material quantities for tiles, mortar, boards and insulation, costing labour and materials, and laying the whole thing out on a timeline. Home Improvement Calculators.
Renovation Timeline Calculator
A trade says the room will take eighteen working days. Two weeks later you are still sleeping in the spare room and nobody has done anything wrong — because eighteen working days is not eighteen days. It is three and…
Material Haul Volume Calculator
The volume of material you need to move is not the volume you dug, because soil swells when it is excavated. A cubic metre of undisturbed clay becomes about 1.25 cubic metres of loose spoil in a trailer, and more…
Trim Length Calculator
Architrave and casings are measured per opening and bought by the length, which means two different units meet in the middle and the waste happens where they meet. A door needs roughly five metres of architrave — two legs and…
Roof Pitch Calculator
Roof pitch is quoted three different ways and the three are not interchangeable in conversation. Trades in some places say a ratio — four in twelve — meaning four units of rise for twelve of horizontal run. Architects say degrees.…
Stair Tread Calculator
A stair is two dimensions that have to agree. The total rise is fixed by the building — floor to floor — and dividing it by a comfortable riser gives the number of steps, always rounded up to a whole…
Insulation Board Calculator
Insulating a wall is two decisions wearing one coat. The first is how much area you are covering, which decides how many boards you buy. The second is how thick they are, which decides what the wall ends up performing…
Stud Calculator
A stud wall is set out at centres, and the count is the wall length divided by the spacing plus one — which is the part people get wrong in both directions. Then come the openings, which need studs on…
Drywall Sheet Calculator
Plasterboard is sold in whole sheets of a fixed size, and a room is a set of rectangles that do not divide by it. A wall 5.4 m long and 2.4 m high takes three widths of board across and…
Flooring Calculator
A flooring quote arrives as a single figure per square metre and it is built from four things that behave completely differently: the packs of flooring, the underlay underneath them, the trim that finishes the edges, and the labour that…