Building and materials
Working out how much of a material a job takes before you buy it.
7 calculators
- Deck Board CalculatorEnter the deck size and the board you are buying. This counts the rows, the boards in the length you want, and the screws to fix them.
- Fence CalculatorEnter the length of the fence and how far apart the posts go. This counts the posts, the rails, the pickets and the concrete that holds it all up.
- Drywall CalculatorEnter the room size and the sheet length you are buying. This counts the sheets, and the screws, mud and tape that finish them.
- Brick CalculatorEnter the wall size and the brick you are laying. This counts the bricks at a standard 3/8 inch joint, and the mortar and sand that go with them.
- Roofing CalculatorMeasure the footprint of the house, not the roof itself. Pick the pitch and this works out the real sloped area, the squares and the bundles.
- Wallpaper CalculatorEnter the room and the roll, and this counts the drops rather than the square feet. A pattern repeat wastes paper at the top of every strip, which is why two rooms of the same size can need different numbers of rolls.
- Stair CalculatorEnter the height from one finished floor to the next. This divides it into equal risers, gives you the tread depth, the total run, the stringer length and the angle, and checks the result against the code limits.
Before you buy materials
These calculators answer one question each: how much of a material a job needs. The brick, drywall, roofing, wallpaper and deck board calculators work from the area you are covering. The fence and stair calculators work from length and height, because that is how those jobs are planned.
Measure each wall or surface separately and add them up, rather than measuring a whole room at once. Take off large openings such as doors and windows, but leave small ones in, since the offcuts around them are rarely usable.
Building materials come in fixed sizes, so every result is rounded up to whole sheets, bundles, boards or rolls. Keep a little spare: a matching batch of brick or wallpaper can be hard to find months later.