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How to Keep Your Painted Walls at Home Look New for Longer

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Even though movers and installers do their best to make sure that your walls retain their color and shine, there’s always the risk that your walls could suffer all kinds of dings, smudges, and scratches that can affect their luster.

While your first response to seeing these types of marks on your walls would be to scrub them, this may not always be a good idea – what you would end up doing is creating a really shiny patch on the wall, which most painters would call “burnishing”.

The best way to achieve this gloss is by doing it on walls painted in a flat finish. Be sure to use it only in areas in your home that get less traffic, such as your bedroom.

Cleaning Up vs. Touching Up
There are two things that you want to do to keep your painted walls looking like new for longer – cleaning them up and touching them up. For cleaning painted walls, it’s not the color that matters, but the finish itself that you need to take into account.

The trick to cleaning your walls is by doing so as quickly but gently as possible. Remove dust and dirt first by brushing it off gently, then dab with a non-abrasive sponge with water.

Meanwhile, touching up is simply applying paint for areas that seem to have lost their color – all you need to do is to use the paint from the original can and apply it the way it was applied, i.e. with a roller or a brush.

The easiest walls to touch up are those with flat paint, while the hardest to touch up are those with semi-gloss or satin finishes, as any unevenness or imperfections are glaringly obvious when light is shined on them.

On Fixing Chips and Scratches
The process in fixing these (especially if you see them in your corner walls) can be a bit more complicated – you will need not just the original paint and a paintbrush or roller, but you will also need spackling paste, a putty knife, sandpaper, and time.

Keep in mind that you will need to mix the spackling paste until it is smooth before applying it to the chipped area with a putty knife, and that you will also need to wipe off any excess paste around the spot.

Once that’s done, wait until the paste has completely dried before lightly sanding it with fine-grit sandpaper, and then vacuuming away the excess dust and painting it.

For larger areas of chipped paint, larger amounts may be required, and the difference between old and new paints is more likely to show up.

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