38 free calculators for trades and homeowners

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Landscaping & Outdoor

Fencing, paving, turf, soil and driveway materials for work outside the house.

The part that goes underneath

Most of the cost and nearly all of the longevity in outdoor work sits below what you can see. A patio is a base course, a bedding layer and an edge restraint with pavers on top; a driveway is two courses of different stone. The calculators here quantify those layers separately because they use different materials and different depths.

The other recurring theme is counting things that sit at both ends of a run. A fence with twelve bays needs thirteen posts, and a picket run has one fewer gap than it has pickets. Every tool in this category handles that off-by-one, which is the single most common error on a materials list.

Getting outdoor work to last

  • Compact the base in lifts, not one deep layer.
  • Restrain every open edge or the perimeter creeps.
  • Build in a fall of about a quarter inch per foot.
  • On soft ground, separate stone from subgrade with fabric.

Questions

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Four inches of compacted crushed stone under a patio on firm ground, six to twelve under a driveway depending on the traffic and the subgrade. Clay wants more again, plus a geotextile so the stone and the subgrade cannot mix.

Because posts and pickets sit at both ends of a run. Twelve bays need thirteen posts, in the same way a run of pickets has one more board than it has gaps. Dividing length by spacing and stopping there leaves you one short on the last afternoon.

Somewhere around a cubic yard for soil and aggregate, which is roughly eighteen of the larger bags. Below that the bags usually win once delivery is counted; above it the price per yard drops sharply and the handling is far easier.

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