Life

Cooking, DIY, gardening and moving — answers to the everyday question of "how many do I need?"

Kitchen calculations such as coffee-to-water ratio, pasta salt, scaling a recipe to a different number of servings and dividing a cake evenly; and the measuring work behind DIY and craft projects — fabric needed for curtains, the window opening for a picture mount, how many fence pickets fit a run, and the cast-on stitch count derived from a knitting gauge swatch. For gardening there is potting soil volume, NPK fertiliser calculation and watering trips. All are straightforward arithmetic on dimensions and ratios; use centimetres or inches, as long as every input uses the same unit.