About DrainHouse

What This Site Actually Is

DrainHouse is a small collection of free, browser-based calculators for anyone measuring, budgeting, or planning work on a home. There’s no team behind it, no client roster, and no track record to point to — just eight tools that each do one calculation reasonably well, plus a side-project Home & Plumbing Museum built from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons material. Rather than describe ourselves in the abstract, this page walks through what each tool actually does.

Measuring a Room and Buying the Right Amount

Three tools start from the same input — a room’s dimensions — and solve different problems from there. The Room Size Calculatortakes length, width, and ceiling height and returns floor area, wall area, and volume, then converts those into the flooring boxes and paint gallons you’d likely need to buy. The Paint Calculator does the paint side in more depth: it works out wall area, subtracts a standard allowance for doors and windows, and divides by a typical coverage-per-gallon figure to estimate gallons and coats. The Wallpaper Calculatorruns the same idea for wallpaper — factoring in your roll width and length, pattern repeat (which eats into usable roll length), and a waste margin, since running short mid-wall is a worse problem with wallpaper than with paint.

Heating, Cooling, and What It Costs to Run

The BTU Calculatorsizes a heating or cooling unit from room area, ceiling height, climate, sun exposure, and occupant count, then suggests a unit size — the point being to avoid a unit that’s too small to keep up or too large and short-cycling. The Energy Cost Calculator is plainer arithmetic: wattage times hours per day times your electricity rate, rolled up into daily, monthly, and yearly figures, so you can see what a space heater or an old window unit is actually adding to a bill.

The Biggest Number: Mortgage

The Mortgage Calculatoris the one tool here dealing with real money at scale rather than square footage. Enter a home price, down payment, rate, and term, and it breaks out principal and interest, adds estimated property tax and insurance, and totals the interest and payments over the life of the loan. It’s a standard amortization calculation, useful for comparing loan offers side by side — not a substitute for a lender’s actual disclosure.

Getting Organized

The Moving Checklist generates a week-by-week task list scaled to your timeline and home size, adding extra tasks when pets or kids are part of the move. The Cleaning Schedulebuilds a daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal routine scaled to your bedroom and bathroom count, again with extra jobs layered in for households with pets or kids. Neither is a calculation in the arithmetic sense — both are rule-based generators that turn a few inputs into a structured plan.

Scope and Limits

Every number these tools produce is an estimate built from the figures you enter and standard, publicly documented conventions — coverage rates, BTU sizing rules of thumb, amortization formulas — not a site inspection, a contractor’s quote, or a lender’s underwriting. For plumbing, electrical work, structural changes, or an actual mortgage contract, talk to a licensed professional before acting on what a calculator tells you. DrainHouse isn’t affiliated with any paint, wallpaper, HVAC, or mortgage brand mentioned or implied by these tools, and doesn’t sell or recommend specific products or lenders.

The site is independent and supported by advertising, which is what keeps the tools free and free of logins. If something’s wrong or missing, the contact pagehas an email that reaches an actual person. There’s also a blog with more home-improvement writing, a learn section, and the Home & Plumbing Museum if you want to see how the systems behind these calculators actually work.