What a bedroom takes, before anybody quotes you.

The room that changes most for the least

A bedroom is the cheapest complete transformation in a house. There is no plumbing, no appliance, no tile, and the two things that change everything are the floor and the colour. The fourteen by eleven room this page opens with, at an eight foot ceiling, is three numbers.

• The floor. Fourteen by eleven is 154 square feet. The published ten percent waste factor makes it 169, and at the 20 square feet per carton this page starts you at that is 8.47, so nine cartons. Nine cartons is 180 square feet to cover 154.
• The walls. Two times fourteen plus eleven, times eight, is 400 square feet, less the 40 square feet of doors and windows assumed until you change it, so 360. Two coats is 720 square feet.
• The sheets. Walls plus ceiling is 514 square feet, 565 with ten percent for cuts, so eighteen sheets at 32 square feet each. Nine bundles exactly, at the two panels per bundle USG prints.

Why this room answers two to three gallons instead of a number

Look at the paint line above and you will see it does something the other rooms on this site do not: it gives you a range. That is not the calculator hedging. It is the source being honest, and this room happens to sit exactly on the seam.

The Sherwin-Williams data sheet publishes coverage as 350 to 400 square feet per gallon, because coverage genuinely varies with the surface, the roller and the hand holding it. Run both ends. 720 square feet divided by 400 is 1.8, which rounds up to two gallons. The same 720 divided by 350 is 2.06, which rounds up to three. The truthful answer is therefore two or three, and printing a single confident number would mean picking one end of a published range and hiding that the other end exists.

There is one thing that collapses the range, and it is free. Your can prints its own coverage figure. Read it, type it into the coverage field, and the answer becomes one number, which is yours rather than mine. That field is editable on every calculator here for exactly this reason: the label on the product in your hand outranks any citation on this page.

The closet is a room and the calculator does not know that

Almost every bedroom estimate goes wrong in the same place. The closet floor is flooring you have to buy, its walls are walls you have to paint, and neither of them is inside the fourteen by eleven rectangle you measured.

Do it as a second run. Type the closet dimensions into the same calculator, note the answer, and add it to the room. A six by two and a half closet is fifteen square feet of floor, which sounds like nothing until you remember that flooring is bought by the whole carton and that fifteen square feet can be the difference between eight cartons and nine. The same is true of paint: an extra closet's worth of wall can push you from the low end of a range to the high end.

The forty square feet of doors and windows

Every wall calculation on this site starts by subtracting 40 square feet of openings, and that figure is an assumption rather than a source. It is roughly a standard door and one window, which is what a plain bedroom usually has. It is also a field.

If your bedroom has two windows and a closet opening, the real figure is higher, and leaving 40 in place means buying paint for wall that is not there. If it has one small window and a solid wall behind the bed, the real figure is lower and 40 flatters you. Measure the openings, add them up, type the total. It takes a minute and it is the single field on the paint calculator most likely to move your gallon count across a rounding line, which in this room is the difference between two gallons and three.

What is not counted here

Baseboard, quarter round and transitions are separate purchases and this page does not count them. The perimeter to work from is 50 feet, which is twice fourteen plus eleven, less the width of your doorways. The Pergo planner divides doorway widths by 6.56 feet for 4-in-1 transition kits or by 7.87 feet for individual sticks, rounds up, and recommends one extra piece for cutting errors. It also says a floor over concrete requires a vapour barrier, which matters if this bedroom is on a ground floor slab.

And underlayment: 154 square feet divided by the 100 square feet per roll the planner prints in its own example is two rolls, unless your floor already has the pad attached, which many do. Turn a plank over before anyone sells you a layer you already own.