Painting a room or rooms in your house or other building can take a lot of paint, or it can take only a little. Do you know how to figure the amount of paint you will need? Here is some help so you will know how much paint to buy.
• First, measure the length and height of the walls and multiply those together. You then will want to multiply that by four (the number of walls in a room). Example: Length = 14 feet x Height = 8 feet so 14 x 8=112 square feet. 112 x 4 walls = 448 total square feet of wall.
• If there is baseboard in the room you will need to compensate for that also. To do that, simply multiply the length of the wall by four. So 14×4=56 square feet of baseboard. However, you will need to also make sure to add in any casings and door frames. Most doors of regular height are 7 feet in height and around 32 to 36 inches in width (mobile homes can have smaller doorways so make sure to measure all of them). Therefore in a 14×14 square foot room, you are looking at anywhere from 71 to 73 square feet of baseboard and door frames. Remember, this is if the room has only one door.
• The crown or trim at the top is done the exact same way as the baseboard minus the door frame. So the top trim of a 14×14 square foot room would come out to be 14 x 4=56 square feet of top trim (crown).
• One thing to remember if you are wondering how I came up with only 448 square feet in a 14×14 room, I am only doing the walls. These estimates do not include the floor space or ceiling space. Also, these estimates do not include having any closets or other openings in the room.
• If you are going to be doing closets, you simply do the same thing you did for the room. If a closet has two walls that are 5 square feet in length and 8 square feet in height and one wall that is 10 square feet in length and 8 square feet in height, then you have 5 x 2=10 and 8 x 3=24. So you have 10+10+24 = 44 square feet of wall space in the closet.
So exactly what do you do after you have these measurements? Well, you figure up how much paint you need. If you add the wall space, the baseboard and door frame space, the crown space, and the wall space in the closet you get a total of 448 square feet (wall space) + 73 square feet (baseboards and doorframes) + 56 square feet (crown trim) + 44 square feet (closet walls) = a grand total of 621 square feet of wall space for that room.
You are looking at one gallon of paint doing around 200 square feet of wall space. So you would need actually four gallons to put on one coat of paint on the walls of a 14×14 square foot room.
I hope this will help you when you are ready to paint a room. Hopefully this will keep you from buying a lot of extra paint you will not need and cannot return.
