Seal & repaint area

The standard is one coat of a stain-blocking, odor-sealing primer followed by one finish coat — the two-coat default here. Heavy soot or protein-fire staining that keeps bleeding through often needs a second primer pass, so scope three coats on those surfaces. Enter the count your job actually requires; the paint SF scales directly with it. The sealer step is what stops residual smoke odor and staining from telegraphing back through the finish, so it's not optional on a proper fire repaint.

Surface SF is the physical area of the walls and ceiling — the wall you can touch. Paint SF is that surface multiplied by how many times you coat it. Two coats on 600 SF of surface is 1,200 SF of paint labor and material, because you're covering the area twice. Xactimate line items for paint are keyed by coats, so the paint figure is what you price against — the surface figure is just the geometry it's built from.

Clean, seal, and repaint when the drywall is structurally sound and the smoke residue releases with cleaning — that's the majority of light-to-moderate smoke rooms. Replace when the board is scorched, saturated, delaminated, or holds protein residue and odor that sealing won't stop. Scope the sealable surfaces with this calculator and handle any removal-and-replace separately, so the file clearly shows why each surface was sealed versus torn out.

This calculator doesn't, which keeps the quantity slightly conservative and covers cutting-in around openings and painting the wall behind trim. For a typical room that's the right call. If a wall has an oversized opening — a large slider, a missing section — measure and deduct it so you're not pricing paint for glass. For most fire repaints, the gross perimeter-times-height figure tracks the real coating labor better than a net one.