Changelog
Every real change to the calculators, data, guides and policies on this site, newest first.
An entry is added when something you might notice changes: a new calculator or material, a corrected density, bag yield or typical depth, a fix that changes the quantities an estimate produces, a corrected figure in a guide, or an update to the privacy policy. Pages are not re-dated unless their content actually changed, so the dates here, on the guides and in the sitemap match.
The estimates are deterministic: a share link always reproduces the same shopping list from the same inputs. That only holds while the data and formulas are unchanged, so if an entry below says a density or a bag yield was corrected, a link made before that date will show slightly different quantities afterwards. The printed list is the record of what you ordered.
If a quantity turned out wrong on a real job, or a density or yield disagrees with its source, please report it. Fixes that come from reader reports are noted here. How the estimates are computed is described on the methodology page; when that changes, it is listed below too.
First version of the site.
- Project planner: several areas (rectangles, circles, triangles, rings or a known square footage) and several materials in one project, each with its own depth, producing one shopping list in cubic yards, tons and bags with waste built in.
- Single-material calculators for mulch, topsoil, gravel and sand, with bag counts for the bag sizes stores actually sell and weights for bulk delivery.
- A concrete calculator for slabs, footings, post holes, columns and stairs, with premixed bag counts from the makers' published yields and a ready-mix order rounded to the quarter yard.
- A paver calculator that counts pavers with the joint gap and cutting waste and adds the compacted base and bedding sand underneath, and a fence calculator for posts, rails, pickets, gates and the concrete for each hole.
- A cubic yard calculator that converts dimensions to yards, tons and bags.
- Guides to how much mulch a bed needs, how many bags of concrete make a cubic yard and how much a cubic yard of gravel weighs.
- A plain-language methodology page: the formulas, where the densities and depths come from, how results are rounded, and the limits of the estimates.