What kind of interior paint for rental properties?

[Jonathan Jaffe]

Does anyone have suggestions on the type of paint they recommend for use in rental properties?  Low maintenance and durability are my goals.  Just starting out with my first rehab!  Thanks BP family!

[Jim K.]

Got a hustle for this.

As a DIY landlord and renovator, I do my house painting myself, in older rental houses that don't rent for a lot of money, on plaster walls that are decidedly imperfect. The savings that I look for in painting have to do with application time and how easy the paint is to clean., I cannot write off my labor in my taxes. Materials cost can be written off, on the other hand for a small landlord.

So for me, the best paint is the paint that saves me the most time and hassle: it's the fastest paint to apply and the paint that lasts the longest. The best color is white, both for trim and for walls, as white paint can take the harshest cleaners and then touch up quickly if necessary.

With that being said, of course the CHEAPEST paint available with the high-performance characteristics I want is always the best paint .

Home Depot, through the Pro program coupons, runs in-store promotions where you buy two 5-gallon containers, and get the third five-gallon container free. This is most often on their highest-priced stuff, Behr Marquee paint, which costs a jaw-dropping $194 per five gallons in my area, or $38.80 bucks a gallon normally. The coupon brings this price-per-gallon down to $25.86, which is more reasonable but still expensive.

It's great paint, but does not perform significantly better than HD's next best paint, Behr Premium Plus Ultra in flat white. Behr Premium Plus Ultra runs for $154 for five gallons, which is still a very high $30.80/gallon.

What HD doesn't advertise is that you can get the three-for-two deal on Behr Premium Plus Ultra if they don't have the Behr Marquee you want in stock. It turns out that they do this because very few HD stores carry a lot of 5-gallon containers of Behr Marquee in flat white, because as retailers they usually sell a lot more of it in smaller containers and in higher sheen levels, and the paint stores offer such attractive short-term credit terms to flippers and pro painters who plan to pay for the paint after they get paid themselves.

So what I do is get to a few of my local HDs with my coupon on the day the coupon expires. I live in a good-sized MSA, and there are a number of HDs that I can easily get to. It's a safe bet that at least one of them doesn't have three 5-gallon containers of flat white Behr Marquee in stock, and when I see this, that's where I present the coupon.

My price per gallon for the Premium Plus Ultra, with the coupon, comes down to $20.53.

I have yet to figure out a similar hustle for trim paint. I use Lowes's Sherman Williams Infinity in semigloss and yes, pay the $45.98/gallon tab for it. However, since it's me that's doing the painting on trim, I brush-apply all trim paint, and a gallon goes a very, very, very long way in properly prepped and primed interior trim.

Speaking of making white wall and trim paint go a long way, Kilz2 primer costs about $15 gallon and an undercoat of that will get a lot more performance out of whatever expensive paint you use, as well as guarantee better paint adhesion. In my case on the kind of renovations I have to do on walls that are old and in very bad shape, good primer for adhesion purposes is a must, not a nice-to-have sort of thing. I go through a lot more heavy coats of primer than I do sparing coats of paint in renovations, and while the bulk of it is Kilz2, a lot of it is oil-based Kilz Original and my problem-solving stink and adhesion primer is Kilz Complete. I also go through a hell of a lot of TSP.

In closing, just a cautionary coat. Although you can at times get lucky, "one-coat-coverage" and "paint-and-primer-in-one" are the two biggest lies in home improvement today.