Interior painting cost: what a bedroom quote covers

Painting one bedroom: what it usually runs around Rome

One bedroom usually runs $600 to $900+ around here, and a bigger or harder room goes past the top.

That isn't a quote for your room. Treat it as a reference point for a quote you already have. A number inside it is unremarkable, and a number well outside it earns a question about scope before anyone argues about price.

Why do two quotes for the same bedroom disagree?

A bedroom is really several jobs sharing a room. Painters draw the line around "the room" in different places, so one quote says bedroom and means four walls while another says bedroom and means all of it.

So when a quote says "bedroom", ask whether that covers the ceiling, the trim and the closet, and compare quotes surface by surface. These are the surfaces to ask about by name:

• Walls. The main surface, and the one where any repairs have to be finished first.
• Ceiling. Overhead work is slower, and a stained ceiling needs a blocking primer before anything else goes on.
• Trim. Baseboards, window casings and door casings. Gloss that has yellowed or chipped needs preparing so new paint grips.
• Doors. A door is its own small job: hardware off or taped, both faces and all four edges.
• The closet, inside. Shelf and walls count as surfaces too, and they're the ones that get forgotten.

What makes one room cost more than another

Two bedrooms of the same size can sit a long way apart on these alone, and none of them shows up on a floor plan. Prep is the one that surprises people, and if the walls need more than filling, what drywall repair costs covers that side.

• Ceiling height. Tall walls change how the work is reached and how long it takes, and setting up a ladder is slow.
• Prep. Nail holes, dents, hairline cracks and failed caulk all get dealt with before color goes on, and bare patches need primer.
• Color change. A strong color, or going from dark to light, can need an extra coat to cover evenly.
• A furnished room. Furniture has to be moved to the middle and covered and the floor protected. An empty room skips that.
• Who supplies the paint, and which one. Premium paint covers better than builder grade, so a quote with one isn't the same job as a quote with the other.
• The age of the house. Before 1978, old paint may hold lead, and sanding or scraping it is regulated work. That changes how the prep gets done and what it costs.

Can painting be priced by the square foot?

It can, and some painters do, but the footage only measures the easy part. The labor that varies is in the prep and the cut-in line along every edge, and neither follows the footage.

A bare twelve by twelve room and one with a dozen repairs, a ceiling stain and a dark accent wall share the same footage and almost nothing else. Whole houses work the same way. Hallways, stairwells and ceilings at different heights each carry their own setup, so a house is a set of different rooms, and a bedroom figure doesn't multiply out into a whole-house number.

Exterior painting is a different job with different prep, and why exterior paint fails early in Northwest Georgia covers what that prep is up against.

Painting a bedroom yourself

If the walls are sound drywall and you've picked a color, painting a bedroom is homeowner work. What decides how it looks is the prep: filling, sanding, caulking the line at the trim, and priming each patch so it doesn't show through the topcoat. How to patch a hole in drywall covers the filling.

Check the can for its coverage, commonly 350 to 400 square feet a gallon. An ordinary bedroom's walls take a couple of gallons for two coats, so buy a little over and keep the leftover for touch-ups.

Hand it over when the room has a high ceiling or a stairwell that needs staging, when the walls need a lot of repair, when the house is old enough that lead is a question, or when a stain says the ceiling is still getting wet. In that last case paint is the final step. What the mark means comes first, and what a water stain on the ceiling actually means is where to start.

If you'd rather hand it over, we do interior painting. Quotes are free, and the first step is a walk-through, because prep doesn't show in a photo.

Write the scope down, then ask for numbers

Take the surfaces for your own room and mark each one: paint, prep and paint, or leave alone. Walls, ceiling, trim, doors, closet. Five marks and a line about repairs make a scope.

Give the same marked list to everyone who quotes, and their numbers become comparable line by line instead of by total. A painter who wants to see the room before naming a figure is doing it right.

If two quotes on the same marked list still sit far apart, ask each one which surface, or which prep, the difference lives in.

Questions that come with this one