Do rooms get smaller the more you paint them?!

[Abcd3]

Just wondering whether several coats of paint make any significant difference to the size of the room?!

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SERIOUSLY 😳

Yes, it would, so would wallpapering. But we are talking millimeters.

OP I have genuinely wondered this too! Like where does it end, surely you can’t just paint and paint and paint and there should no difference!

We've just retiled our bathroom on top of the old tiles and it doesn't look smaller.
It takes a LOT of paint to be the thickness of a tile

Well yes, very very slightly. You'd need a ton of paint to make even the slightest noticeable difference though

Well yes, but not enough that you’d have to get rid of some furniture!

@Swilly Glad I’m not the only one! :) That’s what I’m thinking - do years and years of people adding more and more coats of paint eventually start taking centimetres off the room?! (If it’s a small room in the first place, maybe the difference would be felt?) @Breakfast That’s interesting!

How many homes have you seen where the wall paint sticks out further than the skirting board?

I once heard a chap joking on the radio that to get out of decorating he pointed out to his wife how heavy the cans of paint were and that if they kept decorating the house would start to subside from all the weight

This was a question in the Guardian a few months ago. The consensus was that it would eventually make the room smaller, but that it would take years assuming you were applying more paint as soon as the previous layer had dried.

Yes, it does get smaller, but dry paint films are measured in microns (one thousandth of a milimeter), so it would take an awful lot of painting to even take a mm off each wall.
In reality, it's not going to affect things if you want to repaint every few years!

What if the paint was very thick?

If your paint layer was too thick, it wouldn't dry.
Some industrial paints you might go upto 0.5mm wet paint. And textured paints could have protrusions that were deeper.
But that us still an awful lot of painting to make a room noticeably (or even measurably!) smaller

I once heard a chap joking on the radio that to get out of decorating he pointed out to his wife how heavy the cans of paint were and that if they kept decorating the house would start to subside from all the weight

Genius!