About PaintPro Calculator

PaintPro Calculator started as a spreadsheet, and the painting part is personal.

In 2024, my wife and I built our own house. We self-contracted the whole project, which meant hiring and managing every trade ourselves: foundation, framing, electrical, plumbing, drywall, the works. By the time the painters were ready to walk through, I had spent enough time on the job site to know what I cared about getting right.

What I cared about was not paying for paint twice. On the first bedroom we bought too much, on the second we bought too little, ran out mid-coat, and ended up with a streaky wall that I had to sand back and redo. After that I started keeping a simple spreadsheet. Square footage, coverage rates, deductions for doors and windows, plus a small buffer for touch-ups. It worked.

A while after we moved in, after watching a couple of friends hit the same problem on their own projects, I rebuilt that spreadsheet into a real calculator and put it online. That's where this site came from. No team of experts. One person who has actually painted a house, who has a stake in getting the math right, and who keeps this tool free because the math should be free.

About me

I'm Zack Pearson. I live in Ohio. I run a small digital studio called ProBuild Digital LLC that builds practical web tools, and PaintPro Calculator is one of them. I'm not a licensed contractor and I don't pretend to be. The advice on this site comes from doing the work in my own house, reading manufacturer technical data sheets, and double-checking the numbers against published spec sheets before anything goes live. The painters who finished our drywall taught me plenty too.

If something on the site is wrong, email me at [email protected] and I'll fix it.

What this site does

The calculator gives you a buying estimate based on the measurements and assumptions you enter. The guides cover prep, application, common mistakes, and the limits of the math. They are written for homeowners doing the work themselves or checking whether a quote sounds reasonable.

How I keep it accurate

I use the coverage range printed by the manufacturer when I can verify it, and I label calculator defaults as assumptions. I am also working back through older guides to add clearer source notes and remove claims that cannot be checked. The process is described on the editorial standards page.

Affiliate links

Some posts link to products on Amazon. Those are affiliate links and they help cover hosting plus the time that goes into updates. They don't change which products I recommend. The full breakdown is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Embed the calculator

Want to put the paint calculator on your own site? Copy and paste this:

It's responsive, has no API key, and is free to use.

Contact

Email: [email protected]

Mailing address available on request for legal or business correspondence.