Touching up small area of painted wall.

[Mark Carver]

Just redecorated our living room. After we'd put all the furniture back, I noticed that there was a screw in the wall where we are no longer going to hang a picture, (due to new furniture etc).

I removed the screw, filled the hole, and rubbed down. This left a patch of wall about 40 mm square that needed repainting. I got out the paint I'd used to decorate and painted over the patch. The paint has a silk finish, but after it dried it left a matt border around the patch. I repainted, going out a little further, guess what ? Now I've got a 100 mm square patch, with a matt border.

What has gone wrong, I've done this many times before, and never been able to see the join, even a couple of years after the original paint job. The paint is just bog standard Dulux Silk Emulsion, at this rate I'm going to have to re-paint the whole wall again.

Any ideas how I can fix ?

[Mogga]

Find a new picture to go over it?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well at lest you didn';t do what I did this morning. Grab the paint start slapping it around and then notice it smelt odd.. I had slapped Farrow and Ball eggshell *oil* paint on instead of emulsion!

I've painted over it with emulsion: hope it works..

However, back to your point...the new paint is showing up a shade cleaner than the old. I'm going to let it dry completely. Hope that section of wall doesn't have to be totally redone.

[Dave]

Not sure if this will work, but it has worked very successfully in another job.

Take a 2 inch cube of clean foam (end of a small cheap bath sponge should work) and dab one side into the paint, to load it. Starting at the center, work outwards, rotating around the center of the spot, until you run out of paint. This point should be after the outside of the mark. If you run out of paint before this point, start again at the middle and work outwards that much faster The net result is a shading, by thickness, of the paint.

I hope it works for you.

Dave

[Dave]

I should have specified a dabbing effect when painting, not the rotational effect that my post implied.

Dave

[geraldthehamster]

Just before we sold our house, I had to re-paint parts of the master bedroom walls, not least because the staircase for the new loft conversion had intruded. I had also filled the screw holes from some hand-built shelving that was taking with me.I took a strip of yellow- painted lining paper from the wall, to the paint matching thingy in B&Q. The paint I got as a result looked OK as it went on, but once it had dried, it was distinctly more lemony than the original paint. I ended up painting half of two walls, using windows as the dividing point, and one wall in the bay alongside a chimney breast. Where the two paints met, I feathered it over a large area. I could see the difference clearly, but such are the variations of natural light and shade in the room, it's not immediately obvious. I wonder if the new owners have noticed yet...

Regards Richard

[Bob Mannix]

They've probably repainted it and didn't care anyway because they don't like your ghastly colours! (ie they are not their ghastly colours) :o)

[Mark Carver]

Thanks Dave,

Tried that, and it's done the trick. Now the lamp shades are back on it's impossible to spot what I've done, despite knowing I've done it. In daylight today, and before I tried your trick, I couldn't see the problem anyway.

Thanks for all of the replies.

[Dave]

LOL

When I had the caretakers job at school, I had one corridor that had 4 different shades of yellow on the walls. No one ever noticed :-)

Dave