20 Jan Wall Maintenance

How to Maintain Freshly Painted Walls

Maintaining your freshly painted interior walls can go a long way in determining how often you will require the services of a professional. Whether you are maintaining your living space or turning over a rental, there are several tips and tricks that help you restore your wallsappearance to that new look it once had.

Step 1: Choose the Right Paint. Some paints touch up better than others. Make sure you ask you local painting pro or the paint expert at your local home improvement store which paints touch up best. A semi gloss paint would be more resistant to scratches, scuffs, dirt and even moisture, but they can much more difficult to touch up than a flat paint.

Step 2: Save some touch up paint! Just because you have signed off on the work does not mean your painting pros job is finished. Always make sure they leave you some touch up paint in labeled cans.

Step 3: Prepare the walls. Any holes, dents, or scratches can be smoothed over with a spackling compound. Use a fine grit sand paper to sand any patched areas down to perfectly smooth finish.

Step 4: Spot prime. Prime any patched areas. This will ensure that the touched up areas will not flash.

Step 5: Apply the paint. If the paint has a flat finish then you can most likely touch up with a brush. As long as you feather out your brush marks you should be Ok. Sometimes the touched up areas will flash (stand out above the non touched up areas.) This is common when trying to touch up glossy surfaces. The best thing to do in that case  is to paint corner to corner on that one particular wall. If you have the same paint used from before it should cover in one quick coat.