Blog

Writing about estimating rather than documentation of it: what goes wrong, what the round numbers hide, and what changes with the season.

Nothing here restates a calculator page. The test each post has to pass is simple — if it could be deleted and folded into a calculator's method section without losing anything, it should not have been written. What is left is argument: why an estimate can be right in quantity and wrong in unit, why a round number in an estimate is worth a second look, why the real cost of a second trip to the store is the mortar that set rather than the fuel.

The featured guide at the top is the exception in scale rather than in kind. It sets out the method the whole site runs on — measure the real quantity, add the waste your material and layout actually imply, round up to the unit the store sells — and works it through several materials, linking out to the calculator and guide for each.

Some posts are deliberately self-critical, and those are the ones worth reading if you are deciding whether to trust any of this. One is about why two online calculators give different answers, which is a question about assumptions rather than arithmetic. One is about the jobs a calculator is simply the wrong tool for. One examines this site's own round defaults and says where each stops being right.

The seasonal posts are not evergreen advice relabelled by month. Each turns on something genuinely time-sensitive: hot weather shortening a concrete pour's workable window, freeze-thaw damage that only shows once the snow clears, surface temperature deciding whether a deck stain takes at all. They are written to be read at the point in the year when the decision is actually in front of you.

Posts get added when there is a new estimating angle to write about, not to fill an archive. Where a post needs a figure, it uses one this site's own calculators produce rather than a number invented to make a point.