On 21 December, Chicago gets 9 hours and 7 minutes of daylight, and a north-facing front room in a brick two-flat sees hardly any of it. It’s worth knowing before you book interior painting in Chicago, because the colour that looked warm on a sample card in July will go flat and grey by mid-afternoon in winter. A shade called something like Morning Linen can end up looking like wet pavement by four o’clock.
Start with the light
Paint makers hide a useful number on the back of the colour card. It’s called the light reflectance value and runs from 0 for black to 100 for white, and in a north room it tells you more than whatever poetic name is printed on the front. Alabaster, which is SW 7008 at Sherwin-Williams, scores 82; Agreeable Gray, SW 7029, gets a 60. Tape both up by a north window in December and by 4pm the 60 looks like it’s been left in a cupboard.
North light’s cool and a bit blue, so greys drift towards blue up there and some whites go faintly grubby, while a south-facing room will forgive you almost anything.
Testing a colour properly takes a few days and the price of a couple of sample pots.
- Two patches, each about the size of a sheet of A4, on different walls.
- Look again once the lamps go on, since evening’s when most people sit in a front room.
- If you pencil the LRV beside each patch, nobody has to argue on Thursday about which was which.
- Keep the floor in view too, because honey-coloured oak pushes a grey towards green.
Old plaster has its own rules
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning counts 495,715 homes in the city built before 1940, 38.8% of the housing stock, and plenty of them still have plaster on lath. It’s harder and wavier than drywall, and it keeps a record of every crack the building’s ever had.
Ceilings from that era can hide calcimine, an old chalk-based finish that dissolves in water. Roll latex straight over it and it’ll come away in sheets by spring. The fix is dull and messy: you wash the calcimine off with warm water and a sponge until the ceiling stops feeling powdery, then you prime it with something made for the job.
Lead’s the other thing to rule out before anyone scrapes. Under the EPA’s lead renovation rule, paid work that disturbs more than 6 square feet of paint per room in a pre-1978 home needs a certified renovator, and a peeling bay window will get you past 6 square feet before lunch.
On old walls and ceilings, a handful of signs mean prep comes before paint.
- A chalky smear on a damp fingertip rubbed across the ceiling, which points straight at calcimine.
- Paint that lifts off with a strip of masking tape pressed on and yanked away.
- Cracks above doorways that open in January and close again in July, where the house has settled.
- Brown water stains, which will bleed through latex unless they get a stain-blocking primer first.
Gallons, and the wait between coats
Sherwin-Williams’ own calculator works on 350 to 400 square feet a gallon. Take a 12 by 14 bedroom with 9-foot ceilings: 468 square feet of wall, or about 430 once the door and two windows are out. Two coats make that 860. On paper that’s two gallons and a bit. Buy three anyway, as old plaster drinks the first coat like it’s been waiting a century for one.
The drying times on the tin assume a mild room. Duration Home is listed at 1 hour to touch and 4 hours to recoat at 77°F and 50% humidity, and a radiator running flat out under the window changes those numbers enough that the paint above it can dry in stripes before you’ve finished the wall.
Once you know the walls are plaster, the sheen’s an easier call.
| Room | Usual sheen | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Living room and bedrooms | Flat or matte | Hides the ripples in old plaster |
| Kitchen | Satin | Wipes clean after cooking |
| Bathroom | Satin or semi-gloss | Copes with steam from the shower |
| Doors and trim | Semi-gloss | Takes knocks and fingerprints |
| Ceilings | Flat | Stops light glaring off uneven patches |
Painting in winter
Painting indoors in a Chicago winter is perfectly normal, and contractors are easier to book between November and March. The building just needs a bit of managing.
- Radiators turned down an hour or two before anyone paints the wall behind them, so the paint doesn’t skin over.
- A window cracked open for ten minutes every hour, even in January, because the smell of fresh paint hangs about in a sealed-up flat.
- Furniture pushed into the middle and covered, with a clear path left to the radiator valves.
- Masking tape pulled while the last coat’s still slightly soft, so it doesn’t tear a strip off the edge.
Once the painters have gone, a bit of record-keeping saves money later.
- Leftover paint goes in a jar with the room and the colour code on the lid.
- Write the brand and sheen down next to it, because eggshell on a satin wall shows from across the room.
- A cheap 1-inch brush lives with the jar, since a roller leaves a different texture on a small patch.
- Note the date as well, for the day a landlord or a buyer asks how old the paint is.
Three winters from now, when someone drags a wardrobe across the room and scuffs the wall, that jar’s going to be the most useful thing in the basement.
