Phone: 780 885 1450 | Email: mohamed@mbpainting.ca | Serving the Greater Edmonton Area
HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU PAINT THE INTERIOR OF YOUR HOUSE?
Repainting your interior walls is a low-cost home improvement option. It makes your home in Edmonton easy to clean, covers stains, removes unsightly marks, and generally makes your home cozier. But for how long?
The consensus is to repaint your interior walls every three to five years. Some walls may need to be repainted sooner, though. The kitchen, for example, is one of the busiest rooms in the house. All that moisture, heat, smoke, and oily smudges on walls take their toll.
If you have recently remodelled or repaired part of your house, you may also be forced to repaint your walls earlier than planned. Depending on your family’s lifestyle and the age of your children, your interior walls may also demand a refresh sooner than envisaged.
How Do You Know It’s Time to Repaint Your Walls?
We have already addressed the question of how often you should repaint your home’s exterior walls. Since interior walls work just as hard (or harder), it’s important they don’t go too long without a fresh coat of paint.
But how do you know it’s time to repaint?
A well-lived house has a certain charm. It also feels more inviting to guests. But not when it is cluttered and falling apart, with walls defaced by oily fingerprints and dents.
Rooms that look stale and tired need an uplift for the home to look its best. As we have said, some rooms need more regular repainting than others. So let’s break this down by room.
The Hallway and Stairwell
The hallway and stairwell see a lot of traffic as people come and go, and go and up and down the stairs.
As too often people can’t resist touching the walls, either for balance and as they bring in luggage and other stuff from outside, these areas of the house will show signs of wear and tear a lot sooner than the rest of the house. Contact with the wall is hard to avoid, especially in the hallway because it is such a narrow space.
If the rest of the interior walls still look good, a fresh coat of paint on the hallway and stairwell walls will immediately enhance the space. Repainting these areas once every 2 to 4 years should keep them fairly blemish-free.
The Living Room
This is typically the room you spend most of your family time. It is more likely also the largest room in your home and one you want to look fresher than most as that’s where you host and entertain your guests as well.
Living rooms are typically well-furnished, which minimizes any contact with the walls, so the paint survives longer than it does in other rooms. But if your area receives a lot of sunshine and you have large windows that you like to keep open during the day, there is going to be some sun bleaching to account for on your walls.
Another factor you want to remember is the quality of paint you use for this room. If the paint has a more robust quality, it will not fade too quickly and, as a result, won’t need frequent repainting. A fresh coat of paint every 5 to 7 years is generally agreed to be a good repainting schedule for living rooms.
The dining room may not see as much activity as the living room but the rooms are usually separated by an empty space, meaning the difference in freshness will be noticeable from either room. We would advise maintaining the same repainting schedule for both the living and dining rooms.
The Kitchen
The most important and likely the most frequented room in your home! Either preparing meals, grabbing a quick snack, or washing dishes, the kitchen is a hard room to stay out of.
It is during the meal preparation time that the kitchen walls will suffer the heaviest toll. Steam from simmering meals, heat from the stove and oven, and all manner of messes from spilt dishes to sticky fingerprints will have your kitchen walls looking too ‘lived-in’ for your taste.
Besides the not-so-fresh-looking walls, all that daily cooking means the kitchen will start to smell distinctively different from the rest of the house. That’s to be expected, but as the meal count grows the odour gets more pungent and harder to ignore.
Aside from using more hard-wearing paint, you should look to repaint your kitchen walls more frequently than you do your living and dining rooms. Every three to four years is a good schedule to maintain.
The Bathroom
Moisture can do a lot of damage to paint. It can cause paint to bubble, flake, and peel, which is not the look you want for your bathrooms.
Compared to the rest of Canada, Edmonton has a fairly dry climate. But as you can’t prevent heat in the kitchen, you can’t keep your bathroom completely dry all the time. And being a room that sees daily use, there is going to fairly noticeable stress on the walls not very long after you have repainted.
You can avoid repainting your bathroom walls too frequently by keeping them dry. Ensuring there is enough outside air and sunlight filtering into the room will help. It will also prevent musty odours from building up.
When repainting, which should be every three to four years, choose a specially formulated bathroom paint that can stand up to the wet conditions. Aim for the same repainting schedule for your laundry room, which is another room where moisture buildup is a concern.
Bedrooms
Private to every member of the family, bedrooms can seem detached from the rest of the house. There is also less pressure to update these rooms to look as fresh as possible.
Adults typically spend less time in their bedrooms, so the wall paint doesn’t suffer as much abuse. It is a different story altogether for the younger members of the family.
Children’s bedrooms too often also serve as auxiliary playrooms. So it’s not uncommon to find your toddler practising their drawing skills on their bedroom walls.
Not sure about yours, but when most toddlers suddenly go quiet as if their attention has been taken by something, it usually means there is going to a mess to clean up.
You may be forced to repaint your children’s bedroom every two or so years, but for the rest of the bedrooms, three to four years is a good schedule. For your children’s bedrooms, choose eggshell or satin sheen paints that make it easier to scrub down any wall art by your toddler.
How Often You Should Repaint Your Ceilings?
In terms of repainting frequency, ceilings are treated separately from the rest of the house. But you may also have to separate the ceilings by room as your kitchen ceiling is exposed to different conditions than your living room, for example.
Other than the normal colour fading, you may be forced to repaint your ceilings sooner than expected to cover stains caused by leaky roofs. Save perhaps for the kitchen and bathrooms where you can paint the ceiling the same time you paint the walls, your ceilings can last for up to 10 years before it starts to yellow.
As you repaint your interior walls, take particular care with the trim. The baseboards in high traffic areas like the hallway, stairwell, and kitchen take a lot of dings and dents. You will need to repaint them every two or so years to prevent the house from looking aged and beat up.
Regular Interior Painting is a Cost-Effective Interior Design Tool
The good thing about interior painting is you don’t have to paint the whole house at the same time. Sometimes it’s just the trim you need to touch up. This makes it a more approachable way to fresh up your Edmonton home and improve the ambience inside.
To get a professional-looking finish and avoid messes that ruin your furniture and floors, you may be best served hiring a professional interior painting contractor.
MB Painting is a trusted and experienced residential and commercial painting contractor in Edmonton, AB. Contact us here to discuss your next painting project.
