Scrubbable, easy-cleaning wall paints

Q The walls of our kids’ playroom are beginning to look shabby from repeated cleaning. So it’s time to repaint. Is there an easy-to-clean but more durable wall paint I can use?

Dawn Wiley, New Brighton, MN

A You have several choices, but none is perfect. While almost every wall paint is washable , the smoother the finish, the easier the cleaning. The technical term paint companies use for surface smoothness is “sheen.” The typical progression, from roughest to smoothest, is flat, matte, satin, eggshell, semigloss and gloss.

Chances are that most of the rooms in your home are painted with flat paint, which has the roughest surface. Flat paint is popular because it makes walls look their best: Color looks rich, the texture looks velvety, and even somewhat imperfect walls appear smooth. However, washing or scrubbing them tends to burnish (shine) the texture and mar the appearance.

Gloss and semigloss paints are smoother and easier to clean. Painters often use semigloss in kitchens and bathrooms where grease and hairspray tend to collect on walls. But they also have drawbacks. The shine tends to make the wall color dull and flat, compared with the richer appearance of flat and satin sheens. And worse, the shine on a wall magnifies every bump, scuff and dent. And if you have to scrub an area several times, you’ll dull the gloss and that’ll show up too.

We recommend that you try eggshell, a compromise sheen somewhere between flat and gloss. It’s flat enough to have nice color, it’s smooth enough to clean fairly easily, and its sheen still hides wall flaws and the mild abrasion of cleaning.

However, often the paint sheen matters less than the type of mark on your wall (see photo). Some types of markers won’t come off any sheen. So make sure those permanent markers, erasable markers, mustard (unless you have a yellow wall!), and other permanent-staining materials don’t stray into your kids’ playroom!

(via rd.com)