Story Pole Tools is a set of material takeoff calculators for the trades — concrete, masonry, tile and carpentry.
Most material calculators are a form and a number. That works until the number is wrong in a way you cannot see from the page. A mosaic tile floor needs about a third more grout than the standard formula predicts. A bag of premixed mortar lays roughly a quarter of what a supply house estimating guide assumes, because the guide means masonry cement. A 2×10 stair stringer leaves 3¼″ of throat after notching, which is not enough to carry anyone.
None of those are obscure. They are all well known to people who do the work. They are just missing from the calculators.
Every figure here was derived and then checked against something independent — manufacturer coverage charts, published trade rules, or a cross-check against a separate rule that should agree with it. Where the geometry and the trade figures disagree, the page says which one it is using and why.
The grout calculator is a good example. Pure joint geometry matches published coverage charts within about four percent for tile 4″ and larger, then drifts badly on mosaics — up to a third light at wide joints. Rather than publish the formula and call it done, the page carries a correction interpolated from chart data, and says so.
Where a number is derived rather than sourced, it is labelled as derived and left editable. Nothing here pretends to more precision than it has.
They are quantity takeoff tools. They estimate how much material to buy. They do not size members for load, verify connections, check bearing capacity or replace a stamped drawing. Code figures follow the model IRC and IBC, and your jurisdiction may amend them.
If a wall is holding something up, that is an engineer's question, not a web page's.
Static HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No accounts, no tracking beyond basic analytics, nothing uploaded anywhere. Every calculation runs in your browser, which is why the pages keep working once loaded even with no signal — useful in a basement or a crawlspace.
Questions, corrections and requests for calculators that do not exist yet all go to the same place: contact@storypoletools.com.
If a figure here disagrees with what you got on the job, say so. Yields drift by brand, by crew and by weather, and someone who lays block every day knows more about mortar coverage than any formula does. Corrections get checked and applied.
If a figure here disagrees with what you get on the job, the job is probably right. Yields drift by brand, by crew and by weather. Every yield on every page is editable for exactly that reason, and corrections from people who do this for a living are welcome at contact@storypoletools.com.