Project Hubs

Full projects, not single numbers. Each walkthrough runs the calculators a job needs in build order, and shows where a decision made early changes a quantity ordered later.

A list of steps is not worth much — most people can guess the order a job goes in. What a single calculator page cannot give you is the feedback between steps, and that is what these pages are for. Choose a thicker tile at the end of a bathroom job and the backer board and mortar bed at the start have to change, because the finished floor still has to meet the door and the drain. Move one deck post to tidy a layout and the tributary area on its footing changes, which changes the footing diameter. Every walkthrough here is built around at least one of those loops, stated with numbers you can follow.

The order in which you buy things is itself a design decision. A choice deferred is a choice someone else makes for you: pick the door after framing the opening and the opening is wrong; template a countertop before the cabinets are level and the template is wrong. Several of these pages are as much about sequencing purchases as sequencing work.

Where a project touches structure, drainage, electrical supply or pool chemistry, the walkthrough says plainly what is governed by local code and a qualified professional, and what the arithmetic on this site can and cannot tell you. A retaining wall over roughly four feet of exposed height normally needs an engineered design and a permit; a charger circuit needs a licensed electrician and an inspection. Those pages give you the numbers to budget and to check a quote against, and they stop there on purpose.

Each walkthrough links the calculators it uses at the point in the build where you would actually reach for them, rather than collecting them at the end, and links out to the guide that explains any measuring method the step depends on. None of them re-explains a calculator's method — the calculator page is the canonical home of that, and the walkthrough tells you which figure to feed it and why.

If you would rather start from a material than from a job, the calculator directory is grouped by trade, and each group has a short page on what its calculators have in common and the order they run in.