Interior Paint: A Guide to Buying the Best Paints for Your Home
Interior paint (which really mostly means paint for walls inside the house) is one of those elements of a home improvement project that you notice less the better it is. But the choices can seem daunting: matte, satin, or eggshell? Acrylic or oil-based? Should you be priming or not? Don’t fret! The good news is that the best paints are simply the ones that satisfy the homeowners’ unique aesthetics—so, in that sense, if you’re happy with it, it’s impossible for you to be wrong. But we can guide you toward the right paints for most modern homes. Indoor paints don’t need to be scary!
Water-based paints come in two common varieties for painting the interior of your home: acrylic and latex. Acrylic paints have additives that make them more elastic and clingy and more mildew-and water-resistant, so they’re a popular choice for humid rooms like bathrooms. They dry faster than oil-based paints and can be cleaned with simple soap and water in most cases. Though they don’t contain as many VOCs as alkyd paints, they do contain more than latex paints and should be used with appropriate safety measures like wearing R95-rated respirators, opening windows, and running fans to blow the fumes out of the house. Acrylic is more expensive than latex paints and typically comes in one-gallon cans—you’ll probably see more acrylic paints in even smaller tubes and pots in art-supply stores than in the indoor aisles of paint stores.
Some manufacturers have recently introduced waterborne alkyd paints, which they say combine the best qualities of alkyd paints with the best qualities of acrylic paints, all with low VOCs.
Latex paints are far and away the most popular paints to use for interiors and are probably the type you’ll be painting with. Like acrylic paint, it’s a quick-drying (you can often finish two coats of paint in a single day), easily washable paint that’s much cheaper than the other common bases (sold in five-gallon buckets as opposed to one-gallon), with low VOCs emitted while drying. It’s great for covering large areas and comes in the most colors of any wall paint, but it can go on unevenly or let underlying paints show through if you’re not careful.
When you’re buying paints, look for low-, no-, or zero-VOC paints. Low-VOC paints are required to have less than 50 grams of VOCs per liter, whereas zero-VOC paints aren’t literally zero-VOC — they’re required to have under five grams of VOCs per liter. Though that’s a lot less than the paints previous generations had to choose from, they can still contain VOCs and other harmful chemicals, so it’s still good practice to wear the appropriate respirators and keep the area well-ventilated until the paint is completely dry.