Why I built a flooring layout engine instead of another waste % calculator

Most flooring calculators still work from area plus a waste percentage . That is fine for a rough estimate, but it breaks down as soon as the room stops being a clean rectangle. Direction matters. Offset matters. Cutouts matter. And once reusable leftovers enter the picture, the final count is no longer something you can treat as area plus a guess. While building RampNerd , I ran into a related problem: I needed a deterministic way to validate layout and sheet results against real geometry instead of estimates. That sent me into flooring, where most tools were still relying on percentages. I also remembered my grandfather, a carpenter, drawing exact layouts by hand before installation. The software problem was modern, but the underlying need clearly was not. So instead of building another area-plus-waste calculator, I built Calcufloor : a browser-based layout engine that simulates actual plank and tile placement inside arbitrary room polygons. You draw the room as real geometry, includ