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For painters: from the walls to the gallons to the quote

Interior and exterior, walls, ceilings, trim, doors, cabinets, a deck or a fence to stain: a painting job is square feet to cover and gallons to buy. TailGateBid puts the rooms on a quote with options your customer chooses from, and they sign it on their phone.

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The work

Interior repaints, room by room: walls, ceilings, trim, doors and cabinets. Exteriors: siding, trim, a deck or a fence to stain. And the prep that goes with all of it: patching, sanding, caulk, primer and masking.

How a room is measured

  1. Add the length and the width of the room, double it, and multiply by the height of the walls. That is the square feet of wall.
  2. Take out the doors and the windows. What is left is what you paint.
  3. Multiply by the coats. Benjamin Moore's calculator assumes 2 coats and leaves the ceiling out, so the ceiling is its own sum: length times width.
  4. Divide by what a gallon covers. Sherwin-Williams puts a gallon of paint at about 350 to 400 square feet, and a gallon of primer at about 200 to 300. Use the figure for the paint you are buying.
  5. Round the gallons up.

An example with made-up numbers, not a going rate

Say a living room is 15 by 20 feet with 9 foot walls, 2 doors of 20 square feet each and 3 windows of 15. The walls are 630 square feet; take out 85 and you paint 545. With 2 coats that is 1,090 square feet. Say your paint covers 350 square feet a gallon: 3.11 gallons, so you buy 4. The ceiling is 300 square feet: 1 more gallon, for 1 coat. The quote carries 5 gallons.

A living room, worked through

Sample

Sample Painting Co.

Living room: walls and ceiling

  • Patching, caulk and maskingQty 3 hours$180.00
  • Walls, two coatsQty 545 square feet$817.50
  • Ceiling, one coatQty 300 square feet$330.00
  • Paint, by the gallonQty 5$240.00
Subtotal
$1,567.50
Sales tax (7.25%)
$17.40
Total
$1,584.90

Deposit due on approval: $158.49

Before you ask for a deposit on work at a home, check what your state or province allows.

Only you see this part. Your customer never does.

What it costs you
$937.25
What is left for you
$630.25

You keep about $40 of every $100

A sample; the prices are made up for the example and are not a going rate. Walls and ceiling are charged by the square foot, the prep by the hour and the paint by the gallon. Sales tax falls only on the line ticked as taxed, the paint: 7.25% of $240.00 is $17.40. A 10% deposit, $158.49, is due on approval. At these made-up costs the job leaves $630.25: about $40 of every $100.

What TailGateBid does for a painting business

  • Options the customer chooses from

    Walls only; walls and ceiling; or walls, ceiling and trim. A quote starts with three options, called Good, Better and Best until you rename them, and your customer picks one. A closet or an accent wall can be an add-on they tick. Then they sign on their own phone. How a quote is built and signed.

  • A draft quote from photos

    Take a few photos of the rooms and say in a sentence or two what is being painted. Bid Partner, the AI tool in TailGateBid, comes back with a draft quote: the amounts worked out, the prices from your own rates. If it had to use a typical price in place of one of yours, the line says "Typical". Change it to what you charge, and that is the price it uses next time. Nothing reaches your customer until you press Send.

  • The day, the crew and the invoice

    The approved quote becomes a job. Give it a date, a start time and who is going on the schedule, and your customer is emailed a reminder the day before. When the last coat is dry, the invoice comes from the job in one tap, with the deposit taken off.

  • A painting company website

    Every account comes with a website, hosted at no extra cost. Paint shows in a before and after: a slider a visitor drags across, shown once that customer has agreed. Beside it go your services, the reviews you approve and a request-a-quote form. What is on the website.

What to charge a square foot

The price of a square foot is yours to set. The job price calculator works it out from your hours, what an hour costs you and the paint, and shows what each price leaves you.

Then put the price on paper: what goes on an estimate, in order, with one filled in.

This page is about one trade. TailGateBid works the same way for any other, and Bid Partner is built to price a job in any of them: how it works for your trade.

Sources

Related

Measure the next room and send the quote from the doorway.

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30 days free. No card needed.