About this site and the person behind it

nicetobuild is built and maintained by one person, and this page says who, so that you know whose arithmetic you are trusting.

My name is Ulisses Balbino. I have directed film and advertising for fourteen years out of Sao Paulo, on national campaigns for Starbucks, Disney, Nestle, Yamaha and Carrefour. Today I work as an AI Creative Director, which mostly means I build tools and pipelines instead of only shooting them. You can reach me at ulisses@openyourais.com, and I answer.

Why this site exists

Everybody wants a beautiful kitchen. A living room that feels like somewhere you would want to sit. The thing that stops people is not taste and it is not effort. It is that you cannot find out what it costs without calling a contractor, and calling a contractor to ask a question you feel stupid asking is a wall most people simply do not climb.

So the room stays the way it is.

This site is the second opinion you can get at eleven at night, alone, with nobody watching. You say what you want and how big your room is. It tells you what that takes, how many boxes, with the math shown open beside it so you can check it or read it out loud at the counter. Then it points you at a map of stores near you. No account. No email. No salesperson.

The one rule

Every figure this site publishes carries a public source, printed on the page, with a link and the date it was opened. If I cannot cite it, it does not go up. Where the site had to pick a starting value rather than find one, the field says so in as many words, right beside the number.

And the price, which is the part everybody actually wants

For a long time this page said there was no price here, and gave you a good reason. The reason was true and the answer was still wrong. Somebody who cannot ask a contractor what it costs has not been helped by a site that also will not say. So the price is here now, and it obeys the same rule as everything else.

Sutherlands is a home improvement and lumber chain out of Kansas City, Missouri. Every one of its product pages publishes a price for each of its stores. That means one public page states what a bag of QUIKRETE was asking at twenty four different counters on the same morning, and the distance between the cheapest and the dearest is a real range rather than somebody's feeling about the market. Those pages are where every dollar on this site was read, on a date that is printed next to it, with a link so you can open the page and check me.

What that range is not: a national average, a quote, or a promise about your town. It is one chain on one day. So the field stays editable, and the second you type the number on the tag in front of you, the whole page recalculates on yours and stops using mine.

Coverage figures that do have a source, such as how many cubic feet a bag of concrete mix yields or how many square feet a gallon of a named paint covers, are printed with the manufacturer document they came from. Every one of those fields is still editable, because your can may say something different, and the can in your hand beats my citation.

What this site is not

It is not a quote. It is not engineering advice. It does not know about your subfloor, your local code, your joist spacing or the fact that the wall is not square. It is arithmetic done carefully and shown openly, which is exactly the thing that was missing.