Want this kitchen? Here is what it takes.

Nobody wakes up needing flooring

She wakes up wanting the kitchen. The one with the warm floor and the backsplash that catches the light at the end of the afternoon. That is the thought, and it is a good one, and it usually dies about four minutes later, when she realises that finding out what it costs means calling somebody and asking a question she is not sure how to ask.

So the room stays the way it is. Not because of money, and not because of taste. Because of the four minutes.

This site is built the way the thought actually arrives. The room comes first, on the screen, already drawn. The material is not the question, it is the answer to it. A kitchen is four jobs wearing one word: something on the floor, something on the walls, something behind the counter, and the sheets that everything else is screwed to. Pick the room and the four jobs show up with numbers on them, filled in, before you have typed anything.

What the phone call costs you before it costs you anything

I am not against contractors. I have hired good ones and I would again. But there is a specific kind of paralysis in front of that first call, and it is worth naming, because almost everybody has it and almost nobody says it out loud.

You do not want to waste a professional's time on a project you might not do. You do not want to be the person who asks for a quote and then disappears. You suspect that the first number you hear will be the only number you have, and that you will have no way to tell whether it is fair. And underneath all of that, you do not want to sound like somebody who does not know what she is talking about in her own house.

None of that is a money problem. It is an information problem, and it has an ugly shape: you cannot get the information without starting the conversation, and you do not want to start the conversation without the information.

So here is the second opinion, available at eleven at night, with nobody watching. It does not know your subfloor and it will say so. What it does is arithmetic, out loud, with the working shown, on numbers you can check.

Walk in with a number, not with a hope

Stores do not sell square feet. They sell cartons, boxes, gallons, sheets and bags, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the surprise at the register comes from.

Take the kitchen this page opens with, twelve feet by ten. That is 120 square feet of floor. The Pergo project planner, which is a manufacturer document you can open from the citation block below, says to add a ten percent waste factor for cuts and errors and variation, which makes 132. Then it says to divide by the square feet in one carton and round up. At the 20 square feet per carton this page starts you at, that is 6.6 cartons, and nobody sells six tenths of a box, so it is seven. Seven cartons is 140 square feet arriving at your door to cover 120.

You just paid for twenty square feet you will not install. That is not somebody padding your order. That is the box size, and it belongs to you when the job is done. But notice what happened: the honest answer moved seventeen percent away from the number you would have got by multiplying twelve by ten and stopping there. Every material does some version of this. Paint comes in gallons and a named data sheet puts one gallon somewhere between 350 and 400 square feet, so the answer stays a range until you read your own can. Soil and mulch come in bags, and there are 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard, which is a definition from a federal handbook and will not be changing.

Knowing the carton count before you leave the house changes the conversation at the counter completely. You are no longer asking what it costs. You are asking what one of these costs, and multiplying.

What it costs, and where that number comes from

One rule runs this whole thing: every figure the site publishes carries a public source, printed on the page, with a link and the date the document was opened. If I cannot cite it, it does not go up. Where I had to pick a starting value rather than find one, the field says so beside the number instead of borrowing somebody else's name for it.

For months that rule was my excuse for having no price at all. Coverage is published, I would say, and price is not, so the honest thing is to leave the field empty and let you fill it in. Every word of that was true and the answer was still wrong. The whole reason you are here is that you cannot bring yourself to phone a contractor and ask what it costs. A site that also declines to say has left you exactly where it found you.

So here is the price, held to the same rule. Sutherlands is a home improvement and lumber chain out of Kansas City, Missouri, and every one of its product pages publishes a price for each of its stores. One public page therefore tells you what an eighty pound bag of QUIKRETE Concrete Mix was asking at twenty four separate counters on the same morning: 5.69 dollars at the cheapest, 7.29 at the dearest. That distance is a range somebody measured, not a range somebody felt. A half inch sheet of USG UltraLight runs 11.95 to 16.99 across forty six stores. A two cubic foot bag of mulch, 3.45 to 4.95.

Those figures are on the calculators above, with the item number, the store count, the link and the day I read them, which was August 23, 2026. Open any of them and check me. That is the point of printing the link.

What the range is not: a national average, a quote, or a promise about your town. It is one chain on one day, in one part of the country, and I say so on every page it appears on. Prices move by region, by store and by week. So the field stays editable, and the moment you type the number on the tag in front of you, the whole page recalculates on yours and stops using mine. The tag in your hand outranks my citation. It always did.

Three kinds of number appear here and the page always says which is which. A sourced constant comes from a named manufacturer or federal document and is printed with the citation. A sourced price comes from a named retailer's product page on a named date. And your number is the one read off the bag or the carton in your hand, which arrives pre-filled with a starting value so the page is never blank, and which is marked YOUR NUMBER for exactly as long as it is not somebody else's published figure. Overwrite a published one and the citation under it changes on the spot to say so.

An estimate and a quote are different documents

An estimate is arithmetic on measurements. It answers how much material a shape of that size takes, and it is only as good as the measurements you gave it and the yield printed on the box you eventually buy.

A quote is a person putting their name on a price for your specific job, having looked at your specific walls. It accounts for the subfloor that is not level, the wall that is not square, the door that has to be trimmed, the code in your county, the delivery minimum, and the labour.

This site does the first one and will never do the second. What it can do is send you into the second one already knowing the shape of the answer, which is the whole point. When somebody hands you a carton count, you can now take it, multiply it by the square feet printed on the carton, divide by your room, and see the waste factor they actually used, whether they mentioned it or not. That is not an accusation. Most of the time it will come out near the published figure and you will relax. Occasionally it will not, and then you get to ask a specific question instead of a nervous one.