The reality is, this question can be answered in a few different ways. The simplest answer is that a low sheen latex is the most common choice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best choice for your situation. There can be a number of considerations to take into account. Color selection has a role to play as well as which room of the house you are planning to paint. Does your wall have texture or is it smooth? What kind of paint was used last time the room was painted?

Let’s start with eliminating one of the biggest potential issues that you might have in selecting a paint for the interior of your house, the existence of oil paint. It has been many years since oil paints have been regularly used for interior wall coatings in private homes, but if you have a property that you don’t know much of its history (perhaps you just purchased it) and the home was built earlier than the year 2000 you may want to slow down and do some investigation. The most common method a professional painter would use to determine if a previous wall paint was in fact an alkyd based coating is to use a clean rag or thick paper towel dipped in mineral spirits or varsol. The solvent wetted cloth when rubbed in a small area of the wall will break down and remove the oil paint, transferring the color onto the rag. If the previous paint is a water based (latex or acrylic) the rag will buff and clean the area, but there will not be any color transfer. You may be wondering what you should do if you have found oil paint on your walls, but that process is for another article. For the sake of this article, once you have adequately sanded, cleaned and primed (I would recommend a very high quality primer such as Zinsser) the oil finish, the rest of these tips would be of equal consideration.

Suppose this previous step was taken and you have estimated the previous paint job was done with a water based paint (this is the most likely case), what would be the next step? Considering the texture of the wall will play a part in your choice of sheen. Smoother textures look better with flatter (lower sheen) paints. The light reflective properties increase as the sheen increases and that shows off imperfections and variations of the smooth finish. A flat drywall room will probably look best with a matte or very low-sheen eggshell paint such as PPG Speedhide.

The one other significant aspect to selecting a type of finish is to consider the room that you plan to paint. Often a kitchen or bath paint will have more sheen, but be easier to clean and less prone to water markings from steam. Or if you have small children, and they have crayons you might prefer something easily scrubbable.

There can be a lot of considerations to painting the interior of your home or business and we haven’t even popped the top on the discussion of color! At Brick City Painting we are available to help answer any of these questions that might come up. We offer free, on-site color consultations and have extensive experience selecting products that will perform and look beautiful over time.