know what a commercial painting job will cost.
To be successful as a commercial painter, you need to be able to accurately estimate commercial job costs so that you are both competitive and profitable. Each job will be different and you will want to be able to estimate costs so that bidding does not become a huge draw on time that you could otherwise be using to complete profitable jobs. Following these steps will help you estimate what a job will cost you to perform, but it does not include the amount you should charge to achieve a profit.
Instructions
1. Measure the area to be painted. Multiply the length by the height of each wall. Add these figures to get the total square footage of all the walls in the room. Subtract the of any windows or doors in the room. For example, imagine you have a room with 9-foot ceilings that measures 12 feet by 14 feet. So you have two walls that are 9 by 12 and two walls that are 9 by 14. The total square footage of the walls is 468 square feet. There are two windows measuring 3 feet by 4 feet and one door measuring 6 feet by 3 feet. So subtract 24 square feet for the windows and 18 square feet for the door for a total measurement of 426 square feet. If you are painting the ceiling, multiply the length of the longer wall by the length of the shorter wall to get the square footage for the ceiling. In our example, this would be 14 multiplied by 12 for 168 additional . Repeat this step for each room that will be painted.
2. Determine the number of gallons of paint you will need. The average gallon of paint will cover one coat on 350 square feet of area. If you have 900 square feet of space to paint and you are only doing one coat, you know that you will need about 2.6 gallons of paint. Round it to 3 gallons to be sure. Price the paint per gallon to get the total cost for the paint.
3. Price the cost of materials. You may have some materials on hand, but you will likely need to purchase brushes and rollers, paint trays, drop cloths and perhaps cleaning cloths.
4. Determine the number of man hours you will need to complete the job. You should know from past work about how many square feet your workers can complete in an hour. Divide the total square footage to be completed by their average rate of work. For example, if I know I can paint roughly 150 square feet in an hour and the job is for 2,000 square feet, that's 13.3 hours of labor I need to account for. I should also include time for prep work such as taping trim and sanding or patching the walls, if needed.
5. Multiply the number of hours of labor needed by what you pay your workers. For example, if you pay them $12 an hour for labor and you've estimated it will take 18 total man hours to complete the work, your total labor cost is $216 no matter how many workers you use on the job.
6. Add the costs for paint, materials and labor to get the total of what the job will cost you to complete.
Tags: square feet, square footage, feet feet, total square, total square footage, will cost, will need