We paint walls and ceilings in flats and houses in Málaga and on the Costa del Sol. Not every room calls for the same paint: a hallway gets scrubbed, a bathroom lives with steam and a ceiling only has to look smooth. Here is how to read the label, what to ask for in each room and how to get a ceiling without marks.
How to diagnose each wall, and the order of work inside the home, in painting a flat. If what you are after is a decorative wall, with plaster, sand or a rust effect, you will find it under decorative painting.
Interior paints are classified under a European standard, UNE-EN 13300, which sorts them by use, binder, sheen and grain size, and by three properties tested in the laboratory. When it comes to choosing, these are the ones that count.
Some data sheets add another standard, the Spanish UNE 48243, which also measures what is lost through scrubbing and sums it up in two types. Both are useful for comparing, as long as you compare figures under the same standard.
Paint lost in 200 wet scrubs
“Washable” is not a number
Class 1 · UNE-EN 13300
under 5 µm
Type 2 · UNE 48243
up to 20 µm
Type 1 · UNE 48243
up to 45 µm
The shorter the bar, the better the paint stands up to a scourer. These are the maximums each category allows. Classes 2 to 5 of the European standard lose more than class 1; we have not drawn them because we have not read their limits.
The top scrub classes are for where the wall gets touched and cleaned; anywhere else, paying for them is paying for something that will never be used.
Walls that are touched little and hardly ever scrubbed. For most rooms in a home, wet scrub class 3 is already an adequate resistance, and the rest is a matter of taste: the more matt the finish, the less the flaws in the wall show when the light comes in at a low angle.
Through areas and children’s bedrooms are where the hands, school bags and felt-tip pens are. These take classes 1 and 2, the ones with very high resistance to washing: they can be scrubbed without the wall losing thickness, colour or texture where it has been rubbed.
It is where the walls get cleaned most, and what comes off is not dust: a high-use area, which is exactly what classes 1 and 2 are for. If there is an old tobacco or water stain, the finishing paint is not enough: it needs a primer that blocks it first, or it will show through again.
Steam every day and walls that are slow to dry. As well as being scrubbable, the paint needs a preservative in the film, which is what protects it from mould; there is a standard for testing this. What that preservative achieves, and what it does not, has an article of its own.
If mould appears in your home, before choosing a paint read what an anti-mould paint really does.
On a ceiling everything shows, because the light from the window comes in from the side. What leaves it smooth is not the paint, it is the way the roller is used.
Every roller leaves a trail, and on a ceiling the light from the window strikes it almost side-on. If the last passes run in the direction of that light, the marks line up with it and cast no shadow; if they run across it, every pass shows.
You work across in bands, and each band has to overlap the previous one while it is still wet. If the edge dries, the strip where they meet ends up with a double layer and shows as a stripe. That is why a ceiling is started and finished in one go, not left until after lunch.
Roller lines are the ridges of paint left by the edge of the roller. They come from pressing hard to stretch a load that has nothing more to give. You avoid them by reloading often and letting the roller roll under its own weight, without squashing it against the ceiling.
A ceiling does not need to stand up to a scourer; it needs not to shine and to cover well. A matt finish disguises the passes that satin gives away, and good covering power saves you chasing pale patches with a third coat.
A mark on the ceiling is not fixed by touching up the spot: the touch-up shows more than the mark. The whole section is gone over again.
Almost any interior paint is advertised as washable. What sets one apart from another is the wet scrub class stated on its data sheet. If it does not state one, nobody can promise you it will stand up to the hallway.
Product and brand, room by room, not just “emulsion” (pintura plástica on a Spanish quote). With that you can read its data sheet, check its class and compare two quotes by what is really going on the walls.
The paint manufacturers’ guide puts it this way: in very humid areas, near the coast, algae appear mainly on facades, and fungi on interior walls. It is not just a bathroom problem.
Technically, that it withstands repeated cleaning without losing thickness, colour or texture. It is measured with a wet scrub test and expressed in classes: in the best one, class 1, the paint loses less than 5 microns in 200 scrubs. “Washable” on its own does not tell you which class it is in.
One of wet scrub class 1 or 2, which are the ones with very high resistance to washing and the ones meant for through areas and heavy use. In a hallway the walls get brushed against and cleaned more than anywhere else in the home.
It can, and in many homes it does. Nobody scrubs a ceiling, so what it asks of the paint is to be matt and cover well. What makes no sense is the opposite: downgrading the hallway paint so that it will do for the ceiling as well.
Volatile organic compounds: what the paint gives off into the air as it dries. Each type of paint has a European maximum, and the data sheet gives it next to the product’s own figure. On one data sheet we have in front of us, the limit for its category is 30 g/l and the product declares 10 at most.
It depends on the surface area, the current state of the walls and which paint goes in each room, which is why we do not give a figure blind: first we see the home. What is worth knowing before you ask for a price is linked just below.
For the price, see how much it costs to paint a flat, with the square metres of an example flat, room by room.
Tell us which rooms they are, whether any of them has stains or mould, and whether the home is empty or lived in. With that we can tell you which paint each one needs and prepare your quote with the product written into it.