From the moment my husband and I first visited the home that we bought a little over a year ago, we knew we’d need to change the colors of the walls inside our house. The hallway, living room and master bedroom were a mint green color that appears to have been original décor from the house’s early 1970s origin. The dining room and bathroom were a beige color that reminded me too much of the long line of rental apartments I’d lived in over the years. The kitchen may have been the worst. The walls were a shade of white (who knew white had so many shades?) and there was a floral wallpaper border around the top and at chair rail height. The second bedroom was the only room in the house with a nice color- a pretty, pale blue.

I actually picked up some paint chips before we had even closed on the house. But a year later, the walls were still untouched. Finally, we decided to start picking out some colors. We had seen an article in Consumer Reports that ranked Behr paints high in several categories, so we headed to Home Depot to look at paint chips. I’ve read numerous books, magazines and web site articles and watched countless television shows about decorating, almost all of them including some sort of color choice. In fact, there is a show on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) called Get Color that is completely devoted to color choices in the home.

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Over the past few weeks, we determined that we were going to get Behr paint from Home Depot. The idea is that we will paint most of the interior walls the week after my wife finishes her finals and before she starts working this summer, so that we can get rid of the awful mint green that permates the majority of the house. Consumer Reports had nice thing to say about the paint, and we found some paint chips that had the colors we were looking for and hung them on the wall.

Being as busy as we were, we had only managed to narrow down the selections but had not made any actual choices on paint yet when I went to Home Depot yesterday morning. I had a few tools I needed to get, and figured that I might as well wait until I could get a free light bulb. I happened to notice that Behr was running a promotion for a 25% rebate on paint. I came home, we chose our colors, we measured our walls, and we were out the door to get our paint. We were going to buy it in a week anyway, so this way we can get some of the money back in a few months.

Measuring how much paint we needed was a fun experience. What we did was basically measure each surface that was going to be painted for each color. We had one column that had the height and width that would be painted, and another column for the height and width of anything that would not be painted such as doors and windows. I then threw all of those numbers into a spreadsheet, had it figure out the square footage, and add and subtract all of the numbers for us.

The paint requirements for the house spreadsheet is pretty simple, and could easily be made more useful. However, this was a one-off thing so I just went quick and dirty. The amount of paint needed was off a little bit, because I assumed that one gallon of paint could cover 350 square feet of wall space. According to the guy at Home Depot, the stuff that we bought covers about 400 square feet per gallon.

If you are interested in downloading the spreadsheet, take a look and let me know if you find it useful. We wound up buying 5 gallons and 1 quart of paint, and 3 gallons of primer. Our kitchen will be yellow and orange, and the yellow will carry through the hallways and the living room. Two of the walls in the living room will be a darker yellow. Our bedroom will be a different green than is in there now. The dining room is going to be red.