Painting the interior of a house needn’t be expensive!
For starters, you don’t usually need to paint the whole house! Ceilings are normally untouched, a standard white color, and therefore don’t need to be touched at all (unless there’s been a water leak from a leaky roof or a pipe in the floor above.)

Even in most of those cases, all that needs doing is spraying it with a dilution of water with a little bleach in it, provided the mineral deposits are not too dark. Many a time I have saved homeowners money by using that trick instead of re-painting the entire ceiling.

More often than not trim doesn’t have to be repainted either, because it usually is semi-gloss (white) and all it needs is a little cleaning up here and there, sometimes though, you do have to touch up the trim, instead of painting it, provided you have the same paint.

Things you have to know

You have to be careful though because when you paint over glossy/shiny paint, you tend to increase the gloss where you touched up, defeating the whole purpose of a touch-up! This sheen problem shows up on shiny walls as well.

Most people think that in order to avoid re-painting their walls they are better off using low sheen paint in order to avoid kids or tenants messing them up and having to paint over again. Nothing could be further from the truth, because when you do touch-up walls, you will see the sheen difference where you touched it up!

You are better off painting your walls (unless it’s a kitchen or a bathroom) with true flat paint. Don’t use Behr Marquee or Ultra, both of those, though advertised to be flat (matte) actually have a slight sheen as I found out on a job on a multi-million dollar home in La Jolla, Ca. They are absolutely horrible to work with, they go on like molasses, and the sheen doesn’t allow you to completely hide the edge of the roller marks…

Most people are convinced that they are great paints, with amazing reviews from consumer reports, the magazine from the man who took away the Corvair, an excellent American automobile!

If you paint your walls with a true flat, you are then able to simply touch up the afflicted areas at the fraction of a re-paint cost! You are always better off consulting a seasoned professional before you embark on painting your home, especially when it comes to the trim or cabinets, which can easily be ruined by an amateur…

The whole interior

If you still are wanting to paint your whole interior, either because it needs it (not just because of age, because age alone is not a factor in interior painting, especially in those older home’s bathrooms and trims done with oil-based paints) or because you want to change colors, then in order to know how much it will cost you need to understand a few things…
Many people think that painting a small surface will always be cheaper, so they think that if there are lots of windows, or, like in the case of a bathroom, mirror, sink, shower, etc. having less surface is not necessarily cheaper, the trick is how much cutting-in around the appliances, windows, doors, sliding doors, etc. will I have to do? It takes more time and skill to cut around an object than it does to just roll out a wall (or spray it).

Doors particularly take a higher level of skill, especially when they are not flat. Obstacles, furniture to be moved and covered, flooring to be covered, all of these influence the price. Not to speak of heights, stairways, baseboards, crown molding, or what have you that have to be taken into consideration.

Sometimes a totally flat wall will cost more because it takes more work to not show stippling or roller edges on them. You have to use a different roller for each surface and rollers come made of different materials, densities, and lengths, which also affects results.

Final Conclution

People think that any nimkaputz can just grab a brush and paint a surface, but the results they get when they try that approach usually prove them wrong, on their most expensive and precious commodity…so, maybe take into account all of these factors when you are considering getting the interior of your home painted!
A good way to understand the cost of painting your home interior is to estimate its square footage… most people think that their floor space is their square footage, but it’s not their floor that they’re painting!

The floor square footage must be multiplied by 3.2 in order to get the wall space in without including the windows, (otherwise it would be times 4).
I hope all of this has been instructional and it helps you understand a little more of the ins and outs of interior home painting