About us
About BuildCalc
BuildCalc started with a simple frustration: the numbers DIYers find online are either wrong, vague, or stated as if one number fits every brand, every region and every surface.
Ask the internet how much paint covers a gallon and you will get one confident number — usually around 350 square feet — with no mention of the brand, the finish, the colour or whether the wall was primed. Ask how many bags of concrete a slab needs and you will get a bag count with no mention of which bag, because bag yields differ by product. Ask the price and you will get a number that was true somewhere, sometime, for someone — but not necessarily at your store, in your region, this week.
BuildCalc does it differently. Every calculator on this site asks for the figures that actually change the answer — the coverage on the label of the paint you buy, the waste factor for the layout, the depth for the mulch — and every result is labelled an estimate. Every guide works through a real job, step by step, so you can see where the number came from. You can read exactly how we work in our Editorial Policy.
What we do
BuildCalc has two parts. The first is 32 free tools: paint, tile, flooring, concrete, mulch, drywall, wallpaper and decking calculators. Every tool runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to a server, and there is no sign-up.
The second part is in-depth guides: paint coverage for real rooms, tile quantity with waste factors, concrete volumes and bag counts, mulch depths and conversions, each one 1,200+ words, written to answer the real questions people ask before they buy materials — not to pad a page with keywords. The guides are being written material by material, and every one is checked against manufacturer coverage data and standard trade formulas before it goes live.
What we will never do
We will never present an estimate as a fact. Coverage varies by brand, finish, colour and surface, prices vary by store and region, and every page on this site says so. We will never tell you a calculation is a substitute for professional advice on structural or safety-critical work. And we will never sell your data — there is no account to create and nothing to sell. Read the Disclaimer and the Privacy Policy for the full picture.
Who is behind BuildCalc?
BuildCalc is a small, independent project run by people who have renovated their own homes and got tired of bad material maths — of running out of tile halfway across a floor, and of buying a third gallon of paint for a two-gallon room. We are not contractors, and we do not pretend to be — that is exactly why every page on this site tells you to verify with the product label and a professional. Our job is to make the published numbers easy to use and honest about their limits. If you spot a mistake, or a number you think is wrong, please tell us on the Contact page. We would rather fix a page than defend it.
Thank you for using BuildCalc — and measure twice. The calculators are a good place to start.