The question today was, “how do I clean my painted walls?”
Where do I start on answering this?
1) Good paint or cheap paint?
2) How old is the paint?
3) What sheen is the paint?
4) What to use to clean?
1) I went over this in the last post, you can’t clean cheap paint. There are, however, a number of ways to make a good, cleanable paint: a) Build a really good strong paint that is 100% acrylic and fill it with premium ingredients – this is the approach used by Pratt& Lambert as well as C2 Paints. b) Add ceramics to your paint – ceramic particles will give the paint a tough exterior that will stand up to light scrubbing – most of the better known national brands have a washable flat paint using ceramic technology. c) develop waterbourne tints and build a latex paint around them so that the color is really part of the paint, not a contaminant, and in doing so you create a washable paint because the color is locked in to the coaleced film – only Benjamin Moore has done this with their “Aura” line of super-premium paints.
2) If the paint is old and just doesn’t wash-up anymore, maybe it is time for new paint. If your walls are in decent condition and you don’t want to change the color but the paint looks tired, put another coat on. Painters will run to your home for the chance to do such a simple, easy job and the cost will be (should be) quite reasonable.
3) I’ve been talking about flat paints, paints without any sheen, which are the hardest to clean. Some people want to paint every wall in eggshell or satin so that they can clean anything off anywhere. Personnaly, I don’t like shiny walls because they show every imperfection and, well, they shine. In the Kitchen and the bathroom I put up with it, because they are easy to clean in areas that need to be cleanable.
So here is the quandry, do you forsake the esthetics of a nice flat paint because you need to be able to wash the walls? Or, do you paint it flat knowing that flat paint generaly touches up well where as paints with sheen tend to look like patchworks when you touch them up (sheen degrades with time, so the new paint that you touch-up with will be shinier that what is now on the walls). You do what you like, make mine flat.
4) In general, I don’t recomend anything stronger than a little mild dish soap worked into a sponge with plenty of water for cleaning painted walls. Mr Clean makes a “Magic Eraser” that is pretty good at cleaning walls without marring them. Anything stronger is going to take off the paint either with the chemicals or abrasion.
Now this brings up the Latex vs. Oil paint debate. If you have oil based paint on walls or trim you can clean them with with just about anything short of lacquer thinner. I’ve taken Goof-Off to doors with oil based paint that had been marked up with permanent marker and came out with a clean door.
There are pleanty of other reasons not to like oil based paints, but I will get to those next time.
Jared