When wanting to repaint your home, there are a number of things to work out first before that brush ever touches the paint. Once you have found the perfect colour for your living room, the next step in the process is to find what the best paint to use is and how much you will need. Calculating the amount of paint you will need doesn’t have to be difficult, and Paintway’s guide will be able to easily figure out how much you need.
1. Measure up your room
The first thing to do to determine how much paint you will need for your project is to measure all of the walls you want to paint. This is done with a simple calculation to help you quickly find the average amount of paint in litres for a single coat of paint. You will need to measure the surface area of your room, discounting the ceiling and the floor. To do this you should measure all of the walls in your home from ceiling to floor and wall to walls. Add the measurements of the width of your walls multiply them by the height of the room to determine the square metre size of your room.
2. Take into account windows and doors
When measuring the surface area of your room, you may not be painting the ceiling or the windows and the doors, so you need to determine the size of these surface areas and discount them from your calculation. With your square metre number, simply subtract roughly 1.85 square metres from your calculations for your doors, and perform the square metre measurement for your windows to find their size. Simply remove this number from your initial calculation to determine the surface area of your room.
3. Buying the right amount of paint
With your calculation determining the surface area of your room, you are now ready to purchase the right amount of paint – but wait there, it all still depends on how many coats you want to give the walls, as well as the viscosity and type of paint you want to use. On average, a 4 litre bucket of paint will allow you to paint roughly 32 square metres of wall for a single coat.
4. Number of coats
Whilst many people simply paint over the previous colour until it is no longer visible, the best painting services paint has to offer often like to add a primer coat in order to blank the previous pant, as well as paint a tint layer to bring the vibrant colours to life for a more professional look and feel. You will need to calculate how many coats you will need for each room, so test out your walls with a tester pot of the paint of your choice to see how it holds and finishes before purchasing more.
5. Finalising your calculations
When you have determined how many coats of paint you want to put on your walls, and the surface area of your rooms, you will need to divide the paintable surface area of your room by the square metre capacity of a 5 litre tub of paint. If your paint comes in smaller or larger sizes, use this number to determine how many tubs or tins of paint you will require to finish the job properly. If you find that you are short by a little, order a few small tins to make up the difference, but if you find that you will need more, then go for the extra big tub to make sure you can finish with a little spillage into the equation.
6. Using a paint calculator
Using an online paint calculator can be a simple way of quickly getting the amount of paint you will need for the room to be painted. Taking rough guesses is a good way to determine roughly the cost of your painting project, but getting the precise figure is the best way of making sure that you don’t go over budget, or come up short when that special paint you bought at a discount is no longer available.
7. Paint your walls
Painting your walls accordingly will be the best part of your final calculation and will make all of the hard work worth it in the end.
If you are in any doubt about the calculations and price involved in high quality paint, or the types of paint you will need for your particular rooms finishes, don’t hesitate to call Paintway, who will be able to talk you through the process, and give you a solid estimate on the final price for the job done.
