Painting a Town

You are mayor of Kolkata, and you've decided to create a new town in the outskirts of the city! This new town is very well planned. All the houses in the town are arranged in a rectangle of dimensions $n \times m$, i.e. there are $n$ rows of houses with each row containing $m$ houses. The contract of painting the houses was given to a company **Brute Inc**, which did a rather lousy job. It had to