About HardscapeMath

HardscapeMath is a small, independent site with free calculators for the materials that go into a yard: mulch, topsoil, gravel, sand, concrete, pavers and fencing.

Who runs this site

Jake Huseman builds and runs HardscapeMath. He builds furniture and cabinets in a garage shop, and mills his own lumber for the larger pieces: felling the tree, sawing it into slabs, drying and flattening them, and building large tables from the result.

HardscapeMath is a companion to SawPlot, his free cut list optimizer for woodworkers, and is built the same way: one author, numbers traced to their sources, and calculations that run in your browser. Both sites answer the same question for a different material: how much to buy so that you make one trip to the supplier, not two.

Why it exists

The arithmetic behind a yard project is simple and the mistakes are expensive. Area times depth, divided by 27, is a cubic yard; but the depth is in inches, the bed is not a rectangle, the stone is sold by the ton, the bags are sold by weight with the volume in small print, and a project has six areas and three materials. Most online calculators handle one rectangle and one material and hand you a single number with no diagram, no waste allowance and no idea where the density came from. The result is a second delivery fee, or a pile of surplus stone on the driveway.

The goals for the tools are simple. They should handle a whole project: several areas, several shapes, several materials, one shopping list. They should show their work, with a diagram of every area and a breakdown you can check. Every number they rely on, from the weight of a yard of crushed stone to the yield of an 80 lb bag of concrete, should trace to a manufacturer, a university extension publication or a standards body, never to another calculator. They should be free, work without an account, and be fast on a phone standing in the supply yard. And they should be honest about their limits: an estimate is only as good as the depth you measured.

What you'll find here

• The project planner: every area and material of a project in one shopping list, in yards, tons and bags.
• Single-material calculators for mulch, topsoil, gravel and sand, each with the depths and densities for its material.
• A concrete calculator for slabs, footings, post holes, columns and stairs, a paver calculator that includes the base and bedding sand, and a fence calculator for posts, rails, pickets and the concrete per hole.
• A cubic yard calculator for the bare conversion.
• Guides to mulch coverage, concrete bags per yard and gravel weight.

How the site is paid for

The tools are paid for by display advertising. Ads are kept out of the tools themselves: they never sit between the inputs and the shopping list, and they are not shown on the privacy, contact or error pages. Nobody pays to be mentioned in a guide or to have a product or supplier recommended. If affiliate links are ever added, they will be marked as such and listed in the changelog.

Editorial standards

• Every density, bag yield and typical depth in the calculators is listed on the methodology page with the source it came from and the date it was read: manufacturers' own product data, university extension publications and standards or industry bodies such as the paver industry's installation guidance. Figures from other calculator sites are not used as sources.
• Where a figure genuinely varies, such as the weight of a yard of mulch, the site says so and shows a range or no weight at all rather than a false precision.
• Worked examples on the pages are computed by the same engine as the calculators when the site is built, so the numbers in the text always match the numbers in the tool.
• Parts of the code and text on this site were drafted with AI assistance and then reviewed, tested and edited by Jake Huseman. The methodology page explains this in more detail.
• Mistakes get fixed. If an estimate came out wrong on a real job, or a figure disagrees with its source, please get in touch. Real changes are recorded in the changelog.

Contact

Questions, bug reports and suggestions for materials or guides are welcome by email at hello@hardscapemath.com. The contact page lists what helps when you report a problem with an estimate.