Looking After Your Paint Job
There is nothing quite like the feeling of walking into your brand new or newly re-decorated home after it has been painted and seeing your carefully planned colour scheme in real life. Unfortunately life happens and after a little while your house starts to look lived in ... dents from moving furniture, couches rubbing against the wall, stains, little hand prints, and unwanted artistic contributions from your children. Here are a few tips on how you can maintain and care for your paint job to keep it looking newer for longer.
Dents, Scratches and Scuff Marks
Some marks will inevitably find their way onto your walls, but there are some measures that you can take to avoid these. Make sure to use door stops on all of your doors. Rubber bumpers can be stuck onto the corners of your furniture and the backs of your couches.Often scuff marks are simply from the colour of the furniture rubbing on to the walls and these can be cleaned using a damp cloth and some mild dishwashing liquid. If there is damage to the paint work, use a small piece of sand paper to rub down the scratch until it is smooth and touch up the area with paint of your original colour. Try to keep the touch up areas as small as possible.
Stains
The most important thing to remember about stains on your paintwork is to clean them as soon as possible. When cleaning your stains, make sure you rub gently and use a non-abrasive cloth. Rubbing too hard will damage the paint work and cause shiny patches.
There are two main types of stains, water based and oil based. Water based stains include dirt, juice, tomato sauce, mustard and even squashed insects. A damp cloth is usually sufficient to remove these stains. If you are treating an oil based stain, such as cooking oil, lipstick, crayons and shoe polish use a damp cloth with a mild dishwashing liquid. Permanent marker is a more challenging stain to remove.
There are a number of methods that can be tried including baking soda, toothpaste, dry-erase marker and household stain remover. If these methods are not successful, it may be necessary to paint over the stain, using a stain blocking primer over the stains before touching up.