You’re a homeowner and you want to maintain the charm and quality of your hard-earned abode. You have your typical regular maintenance that you need to do yearly, for example, cleaning out your air conditioners, pest control, and so forth. But how often do you need to paint your walls?
First off – if you are renting in Dubai and the UAE, the property owner will usually require you to paint the walls when you move out. Typically, this is done cheaply and at cutthroat costs as you – a tenant – only cares about getting the initial deposit back. Therefore, the moving-out paint job is purely aesthetic will little attention to quality.
But as a homeowner, you have a vested interest in keep your home in tip-top shape at all time. So how often should you paint your home? It actually all depends – what room it is, how often it used, and what kind of elements that the room is exposed to.
First things first though – assuming you get a professional painter using high-quality paint and you take good care not to damage your walls, it may be nearly a decade before you need to paint the walls again. This is because a professional will ensure that the surface is perfectly primed before applying the paint, mitigating any risk that the paint will flake off over the years. If you decide to paint yourself, do your research and invest a bit of money in the right equipment – in the long run, you’ll find it be cost effective even then though the initial investment may be high.
Now back to your rooms.
As rooms wear down differently, you’ll find yourself repainting rooms separately. For example, corridors, hallways, and entrances, are more likely to be damaged than other rooms as they are typically used a lot. You’ll probably want to repaint these every 2 – 3 years. Dining and living rooms will also be needed to be painted as often, but as they probably contain a lot of furniture, most people tend to hold off on this for a while longer unless they are going for a color/interior design change.
Bedrooms, especially children’s bedrooms – you’ll want to evolve the colors (and room design) as your children get older. Again, about every 2 years until they get a bit older (around 6 or 7 – then every three to four years) is when you’ll need a repaint – to reflect their coming of age of course.
There’s one big factor you cannot neglect, especially that we are blessed with sunny, bright days practically the entire year in the UAE – the sun.
If you have large south-facing windows, you’ll inevitably get a lot of sunlight in the room. Unless you thought way ahead and used specialized paint, your walls will fade in places that are exposed to the harsh sunlight throughout the day. This is by no means an overnight process – fading takes a considerable amount of time and you may not notice it till it’s too late. Of course, good curtains or blinds can mitigate this. Otherwise, it’s another paint job – but make sure you ask for the special ‘sun-proof paint’.
You think it’s time for you to paint your walls, try a new splash of color, or perhaps your moving into a new place and need to coat your old one (or your new home)? Here’s a little gift from us – use the voucher code COLORME50 to get AED 50 off your next paint job (must be used before 4 May, 2017). Enjoy!