Tool time at your house may not include rerouting electrical lines or installing drywall, but most people aren’t afraid to pick up a paint brush or roller and give a room–or several rooms–a facelift.
There’s nothing like a fresh coat of paint to give your home a bright, new look, but if you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you’ll want to be sure to buy and use the right paint for the job.
Paint is not just paint. It comes in a variety of finishes and formulas. You’ll find as many as five options available: flat, flat enamel, satin, semigloss and gloss.
– Flat. “Flat paint is probably the best-selling variety in the industry,” says Randy Robertson, a store manager for True Value Hardware in Schaumburg. “Builders use it in construction applications, and for homeowners it’s the least expensive paint.”
Flat paint has no shine and is probably best used on ceilings. It’s a poor choice for high traffic areas because it tends to be the least scrubbable.
Experts say flat paint is, by far, the most user-friendly, especially when it comes to amateur painters.
“The great thing about flat paint is that it hides imperfections–what we call `substrates’–in walls and flaws in the painter’s technique,” said Kevin Beck, who has 23 years of experience in the business and is a store manager for J.C. Licht, a paint supply store in Glendale Heights.
A good quality flat paint should cost around $15 a gallon. According to a leading Consumer Reports, some highly rated paints include Behr Premium Plus Flat, Ace Seven Star Flat and Tru-Test E-Z Kare.
– Flat enamel. Sometimes called eggshell, this looks like flat paint but adds a washable feature because of the enamel, which makes the finish much harder. It will cost you about $2 more per gallon than flat paint.
“People use it to minimize shine and to increase the washability of the paint,” Beck said. “I’d recommend using it on kitchen or bathroom ceilings and maybe in low traffic areas like an adult bedroom.”
– Satin. Often called satin enamel, satin is essentially the same as flat enamel with the addition of a slight sheen. Beck says satin is a niche product brought to the marketplace to augment the once traditional trio of paints: flat, semigloss and gloss.
“Paint is rated within the industry by what is called a `gloss index,’ ” Beck said. “It’s a measure of light reflection, with satin having the lowest sheen and gloss the highest.”
Paints are made from a combination of chemicals mixed in suspension with a solvent, which, in popular latex paints, is water.
“Paints can contain clay, talc and various kinds of titanium dioxide, which is really powdered metal,” Beck said. “The finer ground the particles are, the more the gloss. As you move from satin to gloss paints, you’re talking about a more refined product with better ingredients.”
Satin paints typically display an “angular sheen”; they don’t shine as you look at a wall but reveal their gloss when viewed from an angle. Use them in a child’s room, or, if you’re a landlord, try them in a hallway. Again, they cost $2 more than flat enamel, or about $20 a gallon.
– Semigloss. These paints offer substantial shine and are best used for six-panel doors and trim, baseboards and window casings. They are more expensive, more durable and more washable than any of the other paints previously mentioned.
Robertson noted that 70 percent of his paint business involves mixing custom colors and that “the shinier the paint is, the harder it is to match,” so be sure to estimate your paint needs correctly before heading to the store.
– Gloss. These are the priciest of paints and feature what Beck calls “a car-like finish.”
Gloss paints are used for the same purposes as semigloss and are particularly effective as floor paint.
“The titanium content should be the finest grade in the gloss paint, and it literally can wear like iron,” Beck said.
Expect that “iron” to cost you as much as $25 to $30 a gallon.
Now that you know the kinds of paint to use, here are some tips on using them and saving money, too:
– Correctly estimate the paint you’ll need. A gallon usually will cover around 400 square feet. You can determine your size by adding the lengths of all walls and multiplying the total by the height of the room. Note that this formula does not include the ceiling. And remember that if you overbuy, custom-mixed paints cannot be returned.
“Be sure to use the paint according to the manufacturer’s spread rate,” Beck says. “If it says 400 square feet and you do a room that is 500 square feet or more, you’re putting the paint on too thin and it won’t wear and cover as it should.”
– To make your paint cover better and last longer, paint over construction-grade paint with a medium-priced primer–about $12 a gallon. Most tract homes aren’t primed first and will soak up too much paint, leaving you less of a wearable surface.
– Whenever possible, buy paint by the gallon. If one gallon is not enough but two gallons is too much for the room you’re painting, perhaps a third gallon would let you paint a second room.
“Most custom-mixed colors are often priced so that two custom quarts would equal one full gallon,” Robertson said.
– Lightly sand any gloss paint before painting over it in order to promote better adhesion.
– “Paint is like anything else–you get what you pay for,” Beck says. “The cost includes the can, the label and getting the paint to the store; those costs are fixed. What you pay for above that is for the solids the paint contains, because with latex the rest is water.”
Cheaper paints can contain as much as 40 percent water, and once it evaporates, there’s not much material left on your walls.
– Experts say that with a good paint you’ll probably get sick of the color or want to paint over heavy markings before the paint will actually wear out. Beck says most people paint once every five years–about the same time manufacturers typically recycle their color schemes and “invent” new colors.
– Computer color-matching seems great, in principle, but both Beck and Robertson say it’s not perfect. A skilled paint specialist with a lot of color-matching and mixing experience can often do better.
“The computer just does it faster and gives us a starting point,” Beck said.
