How much paint for an accent wall?

Most accent walls are one bedroom or living-room wall, 10–14 ft wide and 8 ft tall, and nearly all of them come out at three quarts or less. The real question is the color: a deep shade over a pale wall can take a third coat.

What to know about painting an accent wall

• 96 sq ft, 0.55 gallons for two coats. A quart covers roughly 87 sq ft per coat at 350 sq ft per gallon, so two coats need three quarts. Three quarts nearly always cost more than one gallon.
• Deep colors, three coats. About 0.82 gallons, still inside one gallon. A gray-tinted primer first often gets a deep red or navy there in two.
• Two accent walls. About 1.1 gallons for two coats: a gallon and a quart. Two adjoining accent walls make a corner of color, which works best in a room with one obvious focal corner.
• A wall with a window. Leave the window out of the area (a 3 × 5 ft window is 15 sq ft) and cut in carefully around the trim; the window wall usually makes a weaker accent anyway.

The edges are what people notice. Tape the ceiling line and the adjoining walls, run a thin coat of the old wall color over the tape edge to seal it, then paint the accent color and pull the tape while the last coat is still soft.

The rest of the room is a separate order: how much paint for a 12x12 room works it out after the accent wall comes out of the area. Wallpaper is the other popular accent: how many rolls of wallpaper for one wall.