The skinny on purchasing interior and exterior paint in Washington DC and Northern Virginia
When you walk into a Duron store, excited to begin your new painting and redecorating project, you are immediately greeted by a kiosk at the front of the showroom displaying cans of paint with romantic names like Duration, Cashmere, and Brilliance. There’s something special about this paint; you can just tell. You can almost imagine that can of Cashmere floating over to your house wreathed in satin, spinning around dramatically to the sound of violin music, and instantly transforming your ratty old dining room into something off of Trading Spaces. You read the specs highlighted on the paint’s label: buttery smooth, beautifully rich finish; self-leveling formula eliminates brush and roller marks; single-coat paint, no need for a primer coat . . . and then down below, tucked demurely in the corner: $59.99. For one gallon of paint.
On the other side of the store, tossed in the back section where the showroom morphs into a warehouse, there’s some other stuff called ‘contractor grade’, which is selling for $25.80. Upon seeing that price, you think to yourself that maybe only fools would fall for that Cashmere scam. After all, how different could two cans of paint really be? They both say ‘latex’ on the label, and what is paint, anyway, other than some gooey, colored stuff you smear on the walls?
As it turns out, there’s a lot more to paint than meets the eye. Zooming in on that generic gooey, colored stuff, you find that there is a world of variation between the two ends of the paint store spectrum. What Cashmere has, that the contractor-grade paints lack, is a proportionally large volume of carefully crafted binder. The “binder” is the ingredient in a paint mixture that forms a strong, smooth film over the painted surface, “binding” the paint together. Cashmere probably also has more expensive pigments, which are the solid ingredients in paint that give it color, opacity, and some of its strength and UV resistance. At the other end of the spectrum, the contractor-grade paint is stingy on binder and is stuffed full of filler pigments, which add volume to the paint, but have no innate optical or structural properties. After a few years up on the wall, those filler pigments will start to come loose from the insufficient binder, and the paint will “chalk”, or wipe off to the touch. The “contractors” referred to in “contractor-grade paint” are usually trying to cheaply finish new construction, and banking on the new buyer repainting the building within a few years anyway.
So the short answer is, paint is one of those products where you do get what you pay for. That said, a lot of the difference between Cashmere and the next brand down is marginal, a matter of improvements to minute details that will probably end up being irrelevant to your project. Unless you have the absolute ideal conditions, for example, (which you probably don’t), you should still use a primer coat underneath your Cashmere, and the paint still won’t last forever. So while the difference between contractor-grade and high-quality paint is real, the last $10 per gallon they squeeze out of you for Cashmere is probably a rip-off.
Blue Door Painters’ advice; walk right by the Cashmere and go for the stuff we recommend to our clients: the trusty, solid, mid/upper – range paint displayed right in the middle of that Duron showroom. A good, tried-and-true paint, without all the bells and whistles, is the best bang for your buck you’re going to get in the painting world, and that’s our professional opinion.