Let's paint my living room (or yours)

I have an army man green wall in my living room and I hate it.

I didn't hate it when I painted it of course, but it is time for a change. I painted it a little more than five years ago and I remember the weekend well. It was in the autumn of 2003, and the west coast of Florida was hunkering down for a hurricane warning. This was before 2004's hurricane season from hell. Back then, I never really understood how dangerous and damaging a hurricane could be. Within a year though, Hurricanes Charlie, Jeanne, Francis and Wilma would come along and beat the crap out of us and instill in me a profound respect for  the nightmare scenes the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean can throw at us here in the sunshine state.

So anyhow, in the fall of 2004 we were hunkering down to wait out another storm's passing and I planned to paint an accent wall in my living room to pass the time. Accent walls were all the rage then and the army man green I picked was very much on trend. There was a moment back then when black-greens were the last word. That moment passed about six months after I painted that wall.

I've groaned at the sight of that wall every time I've come home for the last four-and-a-half years and it is time. So how much paint to buy?

Well, I'll tell you. There's a rule of thumb when it comes to paint coverage and like all rules of thumb, it's a guideline more than it is a hard and fast rule.

A gallon of paint will cover 400 square feet of fully prepped and smooth wall. So take the area of the walls to be painted in square feet and divide by 400 and you'll know how many gallons you'll need. So measure the height and width of each wall in inches. Multiply those two numbers the divide the result by 144 and it will give you the area in square feet.

So a perfectly square room where each wall measured 10 feet by ten feet would give you 400 square feet of wall. A gallon of paint would paint a single coat on that whole room. A second coat would mean you'd double the gallons of paint you'd need. Make sense?

So now that I know how many gallons of paint I need, where do I go to get the motivation to actually paint?