Just a quick post on this, but one I thought may prove useful for some.
When you’ve plastered your whole house, the next costly activity (wow, they come thick and fast) is painting it all, and it tends to be something you don’t really think about when budgeting (or we didn’t, maybe we were naive).
Obviously there are some cheap options on the market, like this B&Q Matt Emulsion coming in at £0.99 per litre. However, it is so important you don’t just look at price – you can waste money and time with a cheap paint like this, just read the reviews!
Anyway, the point of this post is mainly to recommend a great eBay find we came across that has worked wonders for us. Buying a pallet of Leyland Trade Contract Matt Emulsion (12 tubs/120 litres) has worked out great value and it has been brilliant for everything, including watering down for a mist coat. Buying in this quantity means it only works out a little more than B&Q’s own brand at £1.25 per litre (FYI the Valspar equivalent comes at £2.54 per litre!) and is incomparable in quality.
It is a lot of paint, but if you’re painting on to fresh plaster, you’re probably going to need to do two mist coats on every wall and ceiling, depending on how long you’ve been able to leave your plaster to dry out. We have also chosen to paint all the walls white for now, just to get everything painted, and to go back over them later in the colours of our choice. Even so, we thought we were over-egging it on the quantity slightly but have just under 2 tubs remaining with two rooms to go…so it’s not as much as you may think!
Either way, if you’re painting onto fresh plaster, you must do a mist coat or you risk your paint flaking off in the not-so-distant future, and I don’t think even Bill Gates is going to be mist-coating with Farrow & Ball! Don’t fall into the trap of thinking cheap paint will be fine for a mist coat either, remember it provides a base for whatever you paint on top and is an important step to ensure a good overall finish. Some of the poor buyers of the B&Q special I mentioned above found that out the hard way when they went to paint over it and it came off on their brush – seriously, check out the reviews!
To show you the value for money we got, the same paint is on Amazon for £2.45 per litre and we noticed there are only 17 days left to grab the deal we did with the Leyland Matt Emulsion on eBay, so I thought I’d point it out!
Hope this helps at least somebody.
Also, two posts in two days?! I’m on a roll (roll, get it? Paint. Roll. Nevermind)!
A House to Call Home 