[Kalota]

My fiancé and I moved into our house a few months ago - it's about 25 years old and the previous owners had lots of things in/on the walls, resulting in lots of wall marks/holes that need to be filled in and painted over.

Aside from these little random holes and stuff in the walls, the paint job is generally pretty okay. We'd love to be able to just touch up the spots that need it, but there is no way we'll be able to get an exact colour match without having the paint that the previous owners used, so we are just going to have to repaint the whole lounge/living/dining area (it is all adjoined, we couldn't just paint one wall or one room because it is very open plan and all the rooms flow into one another!) can anyone see any other solution to this or do we just have to suck it up and re-paint everything to get rid of all these little holes and scuffs?

Also - how long should we set aside to paint these areas? All in all it equates to about 2 rooms plus an entrance area. Would two days be enough time to get it finished? What do you think?

Thanks so much for any help and advice re: interior painting!

This post has been edited by Kalota: 05/01/2013, 09:33 PM

[Kalota]

It is pretty easy to match paint colours. You could either get a professional painter in to do the repairs, or take a sample (cut out a small piece of wall plaster if necessary) and take it into a paint store where they can scan and colour match your sample. You don't have to paint the entire wall-space, having said that after 25 years it probably could do with a refresh.

Two rooms and an entrance could be done in two days, definitely. Depending on the current colour, you might need an undercoat and two top coats.

eta; If the floor is level I'd see no issue pushing your upright piano out and then back in again.

Thanks so much for your reply!!

The house is 25 years old, but I don't think the paint job is! The walls actually look quite fresh and new, it's just the holes and scuffs that have been left that is the problem

So, if we took a little sample of wall plaster in somewhere, do you think they could match it exactly? I've heard it's very hard to get an exact match and you usually end up seeing where it's been touched up. But if we are able to get a pretty much identical match, I'd be happy to just fix up the little holes/touch-ups rather than re-paint!!! Because like I said the rest of the interior paint looks really fine.

Thanks again so much for responding!

[Chelara]

You may as well try to just patch it for now. If it doesn't work then do the whole job. If you do do the whole job just choose a similar or the same colour and you will get away with a single coat rather than 2-3 that you'd normally need.

[qak]

I am not sure about moving the piano -I don't think we could move ours? I remember when we moved in that the two burly removalists inched it up the pathway, they were sweating buckets!

[Kalota]

No problem.

I've matched paint this way in the past and it's turned out a near-perfect match. If you do decide to take in a sample the paint shop can also advise you on matching the sheen, not just the colour. What is just as noticeable as colour differences is if one paint is glossier than the other.

Thanks so much for that. Didn't even think about sheet/gloss differences! We take in a sample and ask them to match it and see how it goes if then the touch-ups are too noticeable we then might decide to repaint!