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Apartment Complex Paint

6K views 22 replies 17 participants last post by  cbinc 
#1 ·
Real quick, simple and easy:
Just curious if anyone has recommendations on interior paint to use for apartment complexes. The apartment complex in question is one they would call "the projects", if you know what that means...

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#2 ·
I’m sure there is someone who will chime in with more knowledge on these types of jobs than me but usually when there isn’t enough money in the client’s budget for a quality paint, I’ll reach for Promar 400. I’ve also used Property Select once on a big job wayyyy back. It was utter garbage but honestly not that bad for the price.
 
#5 ·
Any apartment job I've ever been on all I've seen is Promar700 or that cheap flat PPG sells. Multi pro I think? If you have a BM dealer I'd ask for a price on Final Touch under the Coronado line. It's a much better grade of paint than the others and will be the closest price point product they will have. Touches up great compared to the other two I mentioned.
 
#7 ·
It depends on whether youre color changing, or sticking with the same color. Also, whether you're spraying or rolling.

If your color changing and not spraying, the cheap stuff wont cover... if youre rolling the same color/sheen as before and its not too bad, use the cheap stuff.

if youre spraying, you can get away with cheaper products.
 
#9 ·
The housing authorities around here use semigloss on everything. The private landlords seem to use flat. Maybe the government tries to just clean sometimes without painting.

Promar 400 seems to be the ticket, or something called property solutions. I'm not fond of 400 and I've never used the latter. I used ppg speedhide a few times, but I haven't done any projects like that in a decade or better.
 
#14 ·
I’m retired now but worked for a property management firm and oversaw all wall repair and painting. We used the same color, an washable eggshell off white, for every unit, so we could touch up, only paint one wall, etc, when turning a unit around between tenants. it was a medium quality paint with above average solids, so it could better withstand scuffing and washing. Only cleaning a wall is much cheaper than painting…

we typically used simple green to wash walls. Often that was enough except for heavy wear areas, where patching and priming occurred. The eggshell allowed us to blend in without painting the whole wall, unless the area had reflective light that revealed the change in sheen. The cheaper the unit, the less attention to appearance. Clean, repaired, acceptable looking… Higher end units got semigloss trim, more careful patching. We might then use the highest quality paints and seek “perfection.”

By buying in volume, our paint cost was acceptable. we sprayed when painting a whole unit

Owners of rental units demand low maintenance costs. It’s a dance. We wanted a place to be clean, nice, and pleasant for the tenants yet acceptable in terms of cost.

We did not use the cheap contractor grade paints. They didn’t wash well or coat well. Using them meant repainting much more frequently.

we has used Sherman Williams paints until our local store had “issues” with service and pricing. Then we switched to Valspar products from Lowes, no less. Not great paint but workable. Our local store has a stable paint department that served us well.
 
#15 ·
Avoid Behr products. I picked up Behr ceiling paint the other day because it was convenient thinking ‘how could they mess up flat white’? The ceiling was already fine, just had a small patch. Well, it was so runny I not only got it all over myself but it somehow pulled out the color of the drywall so you could see all the mudding. A second coat did very little. I have never seen that phenomenon before. I had to prime and repaint with a better flat white. Four coats instead of one. Beware!
 
#16 ·
The Behr ceiling paint is more of a matte and not a dead flat. I've used it once and the ceiling looked a lot better when I redid the job 5 years later with SW Masterhide on the ceiling. Or are you talking about someone using yellow tinted mud and it reappearing as that, or something like that? Or old acidic paper bleeding through, etc?


This dude here had Pro i300 take 3 coats white over black as an extremely inefficient/bad DIYer with bad tools/no real idea how to paint with a brush and roller (he is a good automotive painter, though, what his channel is about.) At $25 a gallon and $115 a fiver it's pretty near my Promar 400 price in eggshell, PM400 for me being $24/$110. Behr is supposedly 37% volume solids and 400 is supposedly 34%. Both have the same MPI ratings.

It's for the projects, so I can't really see it as being that bad compared to anything else in that scenario.
 
#19 ·
The problem is people are so stingy with their budgets. I've tried asking for budgets in so many ways, I've lost count; and every time, no matter how I ask, they wiggle their way out of it; but then when I give them a price that's too high for them, they say, "Yeah, I wasn't looking for anything that high." "That's just way too high!" or something of the like. All I can do is say to myself, "If you would have given me your budget from the beginning when I asked you instead of trying to play coy, I could've help place the price in or around your budget more closely. It's just hypocritical!! They will tell me, "Well, I have no idea how much this stuff is supposed to cost." or "I'm just trying to get a feel for what my budget needs to be." or "Whatever your price is, just go ahead and send me the proposal and I'll take a look at it." or "Your price is your price!" ... ... ... Do people know there are ways to bring the price down, and both parties stll win; and if you are transparent with the estimator, we have the expertise to offer different options that help you fit the project within your budget...?

I'm sorry... that was a WHOLE rant, just then... my bad...
 
#22 · (Edited)
ProMar200 is the lowest grade paint I would prefer to use. If given a choice, I would use SuperPaint. But that’s just another reason I don’t really enjoy that kind of work, because those are rarely options.

I painted government housing (each house on rotation of one to three years) for about a decade, using ProMar200 “Dover White”. If there was a dark mark (and there were many) or a patch, expect two or three coats minimum to cover. I can’t imagine using a lower grade than ProMar200. The 200 left speckles from rolling on hands, face, surrounding uncovered areas, etc…

Somebody ordered a different sheen one year (palettes of the stuff), which made touch-ups a PITA from that moment forward. At one point the ceilings were semi-gloss, and the walls were eggshell. “No, we’re not doing ceilings this year.”
 
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