Painting a room can take anywhere between 2-5 days. You can estimate how many days it’ll take to paint a room will take based on the degree of prep work needed and the total surface area to be painted.
Never underestimate the transformative magic of a fresh paint job in a given room. Paint is one of those things where you get so used to it, you often don’t notice its flaws. A chip here and there, scuff marks, or simply an outdated color, a well painted room holds everything together in more ways than one.
For whatever reason a fresh paint job is in order, here’s what you can expect in the process of painting a room.
How To Paint A Room
Here, we outline the following steps to paint a room. This should help give a better idea what kind of work you have on your hands, and what sort of time frame you can expect with each task broken down.
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Clearing The Room: 2-4 Hours
Clearing the room of furniture, electronics, wall hangings, curtains, blinds, plants and other fixtures is the first step to take. Essentially everything that can be taken out of the room should be taken out.
This allows the actual painting to go by unobstructed. Obviously, you also want to protect your belongings from paint splatters.
Depending on how many and how heavy the objects are in a room, you can easily spend up to 2-4 hours clearing it out.
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Protecting The Floor And Fixtures: 1 to 2 Hours
After you’ve removed everything from the room, it’s time to protect your floor and other permanent fixtures. Window beams, built in-shelves, wall-mounted lights, etc. should all be covered with rosin paper and a drop cloth. This protects your floor and fixtures from the inevitable paint splatter.
It takes about an hour to protect a room’s floor and fixtures from paint.
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Fixing Bumps, Cracks And Dents: 4 To 24 Hours
Now that the room is empty, it won’t be surprising if you expose bumps, cracks or dents on your wall. You can sand down bumps to ensure that paint goes on smoothly. Before applying a fresh coat of paint, repair the cracks or dents. Painters putty, caulk or wood filler work well to fill in imperfections. Caulk is your best option as well to fill in large wall gaps. This can be a gap in a built-in closet, a crack on the bottom edge of a wall etc.
You can spend about 2 hours filling in cracks, fixing flaws. This of course will depend on the extent of what needs repairing. With that said, you need to allow whatever filler you used to dry. Painters putty takes about 4 hours to completely cure while caulk needs a whole day.
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Clean The Walls: 1 Day
Don’t seal in any dirt, dust, mold, mildew, and other kinds of build-up into a wall by painting over it. You need to clean and dry the walls thoroughly before getting to work on it. Vacuum off dust and give it a thorough wipedown. You can use a dampened microfiber wall mop with a no-rinse cleaning agent to create a clean painting surface. Alternatively, you can also use a 1:1 solution of bleach and water. This works well if you’re dealing with cleaning mildew off the walls.
Allow the walls to dry thoroughly before painting it. Depending on how wet the walls are, airflow, temperature and humidity, you can wait up to a whole day before the walls are ready to be painted.
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Priming: 1 To 4 Hours
Once the walls are clean and dry, the first step in the actual painting process is to apply primer. Primer gives a solid base for paint to stick to. This ensures a smooth and long-lasting paint job.
Once the primer has been rolled on to all the areas you plan to paint, you need to wait 1-4 hours for it to dry before proceeding to painting.
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Painting: 2 to 8 Hours
The speed of painting will depend on who’s painting the tools at their disposal. A pro painter can paint an entire wall’s first coat within an hour. A second coat will take half the time.
The first coat takes longer to do as more paint is required to properly saturate the surface. Getting into corners and other nooks and crannies also requires precision and care.
Unless you’re simply touching up a paint job, painting on a fresh coat of paint in a room usually takes 1 hour total to apply the first coat. You need to allow the first coat to dry for 4 to 6 hours before painting on a second coat.
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Drying: 1 Day
Once the room is painted, you need to allow the paint to dry. You don’t want to prematurely move furniture back into the room before the paint has set because you can ruin the finish. Give 24 hours to fully cure before moving back into the room.
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Cleaning Up And Moving Back In: ½ To 2 Hours
Once the paint has set and dried, you need to factor the clean up time and the time it takes to put all the furniture back in. Professional painters are used to this task. Cleaning up and egress can take only about half an hour’s time for them.
If you’re doing the job yourself, expect an hour of clean up and another hour of moving back in.
How Long Does It Take To Paint A Room?
The duration of painting a room will depend mostly on the total surface area and the speed at which the painter works from prep, painting, and clean up. Professionals will obviously do a quicker and more immaculate job than the average DIY’er.
If you have professionals at your disposal, you can expect a paint job to take half a day to up to two days to get done. If you have help from others to move objects in and out of a room, you can save yourself a lot of time as well. Take into account as well the degree of repairs needed before the actual paint job. The more repairs are needed, the longer the prep work will take.
Painting a single wall will obviously take more time than painting all 4 walls. Painting the walls and ceiling will also add to the time. These are all factors to consider.
To answer simply how long does it take to paint a room, it will take about 6 hours for an average sized space. But the reality is you need to factor in all the work that’s required before and after to know how much time you need to allocate for this project.
Realistically speaking, give yourself 2-5 days to paint an entire room. This covers all the prep, paint and clean up work that’s required to get the job done right and worthwhile.
