3 Tips for Painting Interior Trim

Even when you hire a handyman near me to paint an interior room in your house, planning for it can be an exhausting mental exercise. What colour should you choose for each room? Which paint finish? The planning process is even more complicated if you have a lot of decorative interior trim, such as chair rails and crown moulding. One option may be to leave this a natural wood colour, but if this is not possible, you need to choose a colour, a paint finish and make sure it looks its best. Here are some tips to help you to get the most out of your interior trim paint job.

1. Choose a Semi-Gloss Finish

The finish of a paint refers to how much light it reflects when applied to the wall. Matte paint reflects almost no light, while high gloss reflects a lot. There are several other types of finishes that fall between those two points on the spectrum.

You want your interior trim to create an attractive contrast with your walls. Semi-gloss paint adds a little extra sparkle by reflecting the light, but not so much that the trim overwhelms the walls. Other benefits of semi-gloss paint for trim are that it is durable and easy to clean. The shinier and smoother the surface, the more difficult it is for dirt to stick to it.

You don’t want the same finish on your walls as you use for your interior trim. Try eggshell, which has a little sheen but is closer to the matte end of the spectrum.

2. Consider Your Design Scheme When Choosing Colours

The exact colours that you choose for your walls and your interior trim depend on many different factors. One of these is your existing interior design scheme. If your existing design scheme is very daring, you may want deep, bold colours or dramatic contrasts between the wall colour and the trim colour. Colour psychologists often recommend that the shades opposite one another on the colour wheel produce the most pleasing visual effects.

On the other hand, maybe your style is more traditional. If that is the case, then you definitely want something simple and elegant for the interior trim. It is hard to go wrong with white or off-white, but at the same time, give some consideration to the temperature of the colour you choose for your walls. If you have a warm colour for the walls, consider a warm-tinged neutral shade for the trim. A cool neutral for the trim nicely complements blue or green walls.

It may be that part of the reason you are painting your interior in the first place is that you want to adopt a new interior style. That’s perfectly fine; just make sure that you take the new style into consideration when choosing your colours.

3. Paint the Trim First

Does it matter whether you paint the wall or the trim first? Opinions vary, but professionals typically agree that the trim should be painted first.

There are a couple of reasons for this: Painting is a strenuous job, but painting the trim in particular requires meticulous attention to detail. Therefore, it is better to complete this part of the project first while you are still fresh. Once you get the most difficult part out of the way, the rest of the project seems easy by comparison.

Then, before painting the walls, take another look at the trim. If there are any imperfections, it is a simple matter to correct them when painting the walls.

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