Authors

Jessica Martinez

Contributing Writer, Business & Finance

Jessica writes the room-by-room guides on this site: how much paint, flooring or tile a specific space needs, how to measure an odd-shaped room, and what a painting or flooring job actually costs installed versus DIY. Her background is not in construction, it is in numbers. She spent six years as a credit analyst, reviewing consumer loan files closely enough to catch a figure that did not match the paperwork behind it. That habit now points at coverage rates and waste factors instead of loan disclosures: a paint can's stated coverage, a tile order's waste allowance, a labor estimate in a cost guide, each gets checked against the source actually printed on it, not against what sounds about right.

Her byline appears on How Much Paint Do I Need?, How Much Does It Cost to Paint a Room?, How Much Flooring Do I Need?, Flooring Installation Cost, How Many Tiles Do I Need?, How to Measure Square Footage, and the home improvement estimating guide. She also writes loan and paycheck guides for LoanCalcTools and PaystubTools, and grading guides for GPACalcTools, sibling sites under the same review process.

Before a draft of hers goes live: every coverage rate or waste factor she cites is checked against the source named on the editorial standards page rather than carried over from memory, and every worked example is rerun by hand with the numbers actually printed in the piece. A dollar figure in a cost guide gets checked against the ranges already used elsewhere on the site so a reader never sees two different answers to the same question. Chris Terry (below) reviews the draft against those checks before it publishes.

Chris Terry

Owner and Editor, Encore Promotional Products

Chris built the eleven calculators on HomeImprovCalc and runs the site through Encore Promotional Products, alongside the sibling sites linked in the footer. He is the second check on Jessica's guides and the only check on the calculators themselves: does a coverage rate on the paint calculator match the figure cited on the editorial standards page, does the waste factor on the tile calculator match what the guide describing it actually recommends, and does a reader-reported bug in the square footage tool's L-shape math get fixed the same week it is reported, not queued for later.

What he checks: that every calculator's formula matches its published source, paint coverage against manufacturer specs, gravel and mulch density against standard material references, BTU sizing against ENERGY STAR's room air conditioner guidance, and that a correction to a wrong figure is made and dated on the page, not silently edited.