SiLOSSiLOS

How many paint cans a house really needs

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ivy leaf
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1The short version

Almost nobody reads the coverage number on the can before guessing at the register how many to buy. It's specific to the product, and it's the one number that makes this whole calculation honest instead of a guess. Two paints with the same price and the same store shelf can have meaningfully different coverage, especially between a basic and a premium line.

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2What it takes, and what goes wrong

A primer coat is a separate line item from finish coats, and it's not optional on bare wood: priming ensures better paint adhesion, increases durability, and gives additional protection to the material underneath, especially on porous surfaces like bare wood, where skipping it is one of the most common reasons a finish coat fails early. The common counting mistake is forgetting to subtract windows and doors at all, which overstates the paint needed by a meaningful margin on a house with a lot of glass.

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3The first hour

Measuring the actual perimeter and wall heights, rather than estimating from memory, is the entire first hour of a real paint job, and it's the part that makes every gallon count later actually correct.

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