Running short on mulch and paying for a second delivery

The beds come to 450 square feet, and she wants them at 3 inches. Square feet times inches, divided by 324: 450 times 3 is 1,350, and that's 4.2 yards.

Say your supplier sells by the half yard. You order 4.5 and figure the extra third of a yard covers the spills.

Then the crew starts spreading. The edges go on thick, a wheelbarrow tips on the slope, and the low corner by the downspout drinks it. Say the beds end up taking 3.5 inches on average. That's 450 times 3.5, or 1,575, divided by 324: 4.9 yards. You brought 4.5. The last bed is bare dirt.

Now somebody drives back to the yard. Say the supplier charges $65 to deliver, and two guys stand around for an hour at $30 each while they wait. That's $125 to move a little over a third of a yard. Say a yard of mulch costs you $45. A whole extra yard would have been cheaper than the trip, and you'd have had more than half of it left on the pile.

Buy the extra unit, not the extra trip

The trip costs the same whether you're short a little or a lot. An extra unit of material is small next to it, so the cheap mistake is ordering over.

Kevin Goodwin, a contractor in Alabama who helped build Yardstick, measures every bed, adds them up, and then adds one more yard to every mulch order. Here that's 4.2 plus 1, so 5.2 yards. If your yard sells half yards, that's 5.5 on the ticket, which covers the 4.9 the beds took with 0.6 to spare. He does the same with concrete: half a yard over, rounded up to the whole yards his plant sells, like on the patio and the walk.

Put the extra in your price, too. You pay for it on every job, whether it goes in the beds or back on the pile, so it belongs on the estimate.

Yardstick adds your extra yard to the mulch order before it prices the job.