With the vast choice of apps available for your iPhone, it’s difficult to know where to start when you’re looking for something to meet your specific needs. I was checking out the range of apps for my do-it-yourself needs and came up with a long list of options. I narrowed my choice down to the following essential DIY apps which are ideal for painters, plumbers, designers, constructors and home improvement fanatics (like me).

Handyman Sidekick

The Handyman Sidekick is a useful little app for carrying out the calculations you need for painting, flooring, wallpapering and gardening projects. If you need to know how much paint you’ll need or how many tiles will be enough without going over budget, enter your measurements and hit the calculate tab. The Handyman Sidekick will do the math. The Handyman Sidekick also contains a flashlight app so you won’t be stuck in the dark. This app is useful for having all the calculator tools in the same place but one review mentions it’s a bit pricey for what you get.

Convert Units for Free

The Convert Units for Free app does exactly what you’d expect – converts units for zero cents. It also offers custom conversions if you want more flexibility in your home improvement calculations. There are 13 ready-made categories of conversion – angle, area, data, energy, force etc – but you can create your own if you don’t see what you’re looking for. The interface is user-friendly and you don’t need a mathematics degree to handle the programs.

Convert Aid

This conversion app is no-frills – simple and easy to use. No flashiness, just basic categories for converting units of measurement in five categories, distance, volume, area, weight, velocity and temperature. This app will be handy as a pocket aid but it won’t do much for your complex home improvement or construction projects.

iHandy Carpenter

If you’re looking for more gadgets for your virtual tool box, the iHandy Carpenter provides five of them to help you on your construction projects. Handy tools include the plumb bob to measure the verticality of walls, a surface level to level flat surfaces, a bubble level, steel protractor and steel ruler with inches and centimeters. Reviews say “great for quick reference when checking a job,” “the ruler is useless but the level is super cool” and “very useable app.”

Home Sizer

Are you working on a large project such as designing a home or remodeling your house? If so, use the Home Sizer app to estimate and measure the size of your home and calculate the area of individual rooms and the usable square footage. Add notes to each room to keep track of your ideas. Once you’ve added everything up you can calculate the value of your home and estimate your monthly mortgage payments with the mortgage calculator. Add rooms, remove rooms, change the size of the kitchen and watch your estimated mortgage payments rise and fall. One review says “I like the new look, after the update. I like the ability to now not only design my home size but get some idea what it might cost or be worth. Thanks for making it easier to get to the room pick list. I use that function a lot. ”

Palettes

When it’s time to add a little color to your construction and home improvement projects, use the Palettes app to create and save color schemes. Grab colors from websites and photos and find matching colors to form your own personalized color palette to use for room design and home decorating.

Concrete Calculator Pro

This iPhone app features four tabs to calculate the amount of concrete you need for a job, whether it’s a square floor or a tube or circle, and the cost based on your depth and area. You can also convert the measurements to bags of concrete, making it easy to know just how much you need to order to get the job done.