Siding Calculators, One Engine

This is where every project starts and where the engine lives. Add rectangular wall sections and triangular gables until the list matches the house in front of you — front, back, both sides, dormers, porch returns, bump-outs. Deduct doors, windows, and garage doors from the preset shelf or by custom area, and the net figure that comes back is the surface that will actually wear siding. One more click converts it into the units the trade buys in: squares of 100 square feet and cartons sized by your profile's real coverage. The same takeoff also powers every other category below, which is why it is worth measuring wall by wall instead of eyeballing one average facade.

Field siding gets the glory and trim stops the job. The accessory estimator works from the geometry you already entered: J-channel around every opening and along gable rakes, corner posts from the building's vertical corners, starter strip along the base perimeter, and fascia where the roofline asks for it. Piece counts come back in standard 10 ft and 12 ft lengths, always rounded up, because a fraction of a corner post is not a thing the supply house sells and a piece short on Saturday is a crew standing still. First-time estimators forget this category entirely; experienced ones buy from it first.

A single blended number is the enemy of a real budget. The cost tools split the project the way invoices actually arrive: material cost from the unit price you set per square foot, labor cost computed on the net installed area the way siding crews quote it, and tear-off priced as its own line for stripping the old cladding. Flex one line without breaking the others — swap the profile price, keep the labor; defer the tear-off a season; compare a DIY-materials scenario against a hired-crew scenario on identical inputs. When quotes come back, each line has something honest to be compared against.

Every estimate is only as trustworthy as the vocabulary and units behind it. This category holds the reference layer: ten profile presets with real exposures and carton coverages — vinyl Double 4, 4.5, and 5, lap and clapboard at 4 through 8 inches, fiber cement planks, corrugated metal, and board-and-batten — each fully editable when your carton label says otherwise. The unit system switches as a whole, inputs and outputs together, so a metric plan converts without a second pass of manual arithmetic. And the plain-language reference pages decode the words the trade uses, from what a square actually is to why waste exists at all.