Interior Painting

One Color Can Run Through the House. One Sheen Cannot.

The most common brief we get is a single color for the whole interior, and it is usually a good instinct. A warm off-white running through every room reads calm and makes a small 1930s floor plan feel bigger than it is. What people do not expect is our answer, which is yes to the color and no to a single finish.

A ceiling, a bedroom wall, a hallway wall, a bathroom wall and a door casing are five different jobs. They get different amounts of light, different amounts of hand contact and wildly different amounts of moisture. Asking one finish to serve all five means four of them are wrong. Specifying five costs nothing extra in labor and only a few dollars in material, because we are buying the same base and the same tint either way.

What We Put Where

Ceilings go flat. Every lamp in a room throws light across a ceiling at a shallow angle, which is the exact condition that reveals seams, roller laps and old patches. Flat scatters that light and the surface visually disappears. Flat ceiling paint is also the only finish in the house that touches up invisibly, which you will appreciate the first time a fixture gets moved.

Bedrooms and formal rooms go matte or eggshell. These are low traffic and low moisture. Modern matte products are far more washable than the chalky flats of twenty years ago while keeping most of the hiding power, so on an older plaster wall a matte is very often the honest choice. A child’s bedroom gets eggshell instead, because that wall is going to be handled.

Hallways, stairwells and entries go satin. These walls take shoulders, bags and dogs, and they are the walls people wipe. Satin takes a damp cloth without burnishing into a shiny patch. In a narrow bungalow hallway with no window of its own, the small amount of reflectivity is a bonus rather than a problem.

Kitchens and bathrooms go satin, with semi-gloss around the wet zone. Long Beach mornings sit under the marine layer and a poorly vented bathroom stays damp for hours after a shower. A tighter, harder film gives mildew less purchase and lets you clean the corners without ruining the wall.

Trim, doors and cabinets go semi-gloss. Trim is supposed to read as a separate element, and sheen separates it more convincingly than color does. It is also the most touched surface in the building, so it needs the hardest film. Waterborne alkyd enamel flows out and levels the way old oil enamel did, without the yellowing that made oil trim look dirty after five years.

The Order of Work

We hang sample boards first, in the actual sheen, and look at them with you in morning light and again in late afternoon. We patch, caulk the trim joints and prime what needs priming, using a stain blocking primer where there is water staining or tannin bleed and a bonding primer over anything glossy. Then two coats, always two on a color change and always two on a sheen change.

Floors get covered, the day’s rooms get contained, and the house gets put back together every evening rather than at the end of the week.

Call (562) 462-0925 for a walkthrough. Bring your color idea. We will bring the argument about the finish.