I’m trying to spiff up a room without going to all the fuss of repainting the whole thing. There are some recently replastered sections that need to be painted (I have some leftover original paint for that purpose ), but on the whole, the room’s existing paint job is in pretty good shape. Still, it is dingy in places.
I’d like to clean the walls so that the dingy portions are not so noticeable and the soon-to-be painted replastered spots blend in well with the existing paint job.
Any advice? IIRC from my childhood, 1950s and '60s-era DIY books always recommended trisodium phosphate as the handyman’s all-purpose cleaner. Do they still make/sell such a product? If so, it’s probably got a brand name these days – anyone know what it is? Or should I use something else entirely?
A Mr. Clean magic eraser and plain water works well, but might take some of the paint off if it’s flat paint. It’s perfect for grubby baseboards, molding, etc with semi-gloss.
trisodium phosphate is still available under different brand names. we used it to clean our brick fireplace - worked very well. My mother used to swear by it for cleaning walls.
My mother recently repainted part of her house. The painters had been recomended by a friend; they took a look and, seeing that she already had a mid-height decorative pattern in the main bathroom and that the scuffed parts were all relatively low, proposed painting only the bottoms of those rooms. They used these grey tapes of patterned paper, about 52 wide, that you place as a “border” and then paint over; they painted them in the same color and while they painted the bottom of the wall. Even if you’re using the original paint, it won’t be the same color any more.
Other solutions are putting up a corkboard or somesuch.
I absolutely hate cleaning walls, I find it much harder than simply repainting. It has also been my experience that using the original paint won’t match if it has been more than a year or so since the original painting. My advice would be to paint the whole room, or at least the whole wall.
I’ve used tsp on the walls of a house that had smokers in it and it got all of the yellow gunk off and got rid of the smell. Citrus cleaner works well too.
Some general advice - wear terrycloth wristbands (like athletes use) when using a saturated sponge or cloth on the walls. Keeps the water from running down your arm.
Or you could go for a ‘decorative’ effect. Paint the new plaster the old color, but also buy a quart or so of the same color but two shades darker/more intense. Use a sea sponge, and dab the new paint all over the walls randomly. Faster and easier than either washing or doing a complete repaint.
Trisodium phosphate is sold 'round here under the exotic brand name of TSP, not hard to find at all. It is the best thing ever for wall-washing, and does a bang up job of cleaning every last molecule of caked in grease out of your hands too. If you don’t work in a factory like I do, you might want to wear gloves to keep your skin intact, but I rather like losing those couple of top layers and having super clean looking hands for a while.
If it’s a huge job you could pay someone to come clean it. My parents had this done in their rather large family room where they have an un-vented gas fireplace and my dad sits and smokes. I think they just called up one of those companies that does specialized cleaning, like after a fire.
In a small room, we found that Windex was the only thing we had on hand that would do the job.
I always use TSP before painting, and it removes a horrifying amount of dirt from the walls. Just be sure to wear gloves, I got some nice chemical burns one time because I figured I was too special to bother.
Can’t be done, it will NEVER quite match. And that’s worse than how it looks now. Truthfully you need to either ignore it or paint it - and painting doesn’t take as long as you think.
I can’t comment on the TSP, but those magic erasers do work wonders. When I helped clean my grandparents wallpapered room, they easily took off 20+ years of smoke/dead skin/ etc. without any problem.
You could also use lighting to change the appearance of the walls in a very simply way. Just put a lamp where the dirty wall is and put a coloured bulb in it, or get a multi-bulbed light that goes in your normal light fitting, and experiment with angles, brightnesses and possibly colours until it looks right.
This sounds odd, but if it’s a semi- or high-gloss paint (I’ve never tried it on a flat paint), the Swiffer wet floor mop works good, to wash down walls without streaking or rinsing. Not the Wet-Jet thing, just the mop thing with the wet floor pads.