Bedroom Refresh in Chalk Wash Over Old Paint

The most common bedroom job is not a colour change — it is putting a clean, flat, matte film over paint that has gone shiny and grey from years of wiping. Chalk Wash at LRV 85 does that without turning the room into a light box, and a dead-flat matte hides the dents that a bedroom wall always collects.

Coats

2

Sheen

Matte · 2u

Substrate

Old paint

Touch dry

1 hours

Recoat after

4 hours

VOC

18 g/L

Full cure

21 days

What you are actually covering

Old emulsion that has been wiped a few hundred times develops a sheen gradient: glossy at hand height, flat near the ceiling. If you roll a new matte coat straight over it, the new paint takes on the old surface texture and the wall ends up looking patchy under a bedside lamp. Chalk Wash is a warm off-white with a faint yellow-brown undertone, which is deliberately chosen for walls lit by warm bulbs at night rather than by daylight.

Matte is a tolerance decision, not just a look

At LRV 85 a matte film reflects almost no specular light, so surface defects vanish. The trade-off is cleanability: matte burnishes. Rub a mark twice with a dry cloth and you leave a glossy smear that is more visible than the mark was.

• Choose matte where the wall is above 1000mm from traffic and mostly lit at an angle (bedrooms, dining rooms, ceilings).
• Choose eggshell behind beds and around door handles, where hands and luggage actually land.
• Washable matte sits between the two and is the honest compromise if you want one product for the whole room.

Preparation over sound old paint

1. Wash the walls with warm water and a drop of washing-up liquid. Skin oils and hairspray residue sit on top of old paint and will cause the new coat to crawl away from the wall in patches around the bed head.
2. Scrape any flaking edge back to sound paint with a flexible 35 mm knife, then feather the ridge with P120 and finish with P180.
3. Fill any nail holes with a fine-surface filler. Over-fill slightly, then sand flush once cured — most fine fillers shrink as they dry.
4. Caulk the skirting-to-wall gap. It is usually 1-3 mm and shows as a hard dark line that no paint hides.
5. Tack cloth the whole room, including the ceiling line. Vacuum dust settles back within minutes, so do this immediately before you start painting.

Coats, timing, and the 21-day cure

Stage	Timing at 20 C / 50% RH	Notes
Touch dry	1 hour	Do not touch to test
Recoat	4 hours	6-8 hours below 15 C
Full cure	21 days	No washing, no furniture pressed flat against the wall

The cure window matters more in a bedroom than anywhere else. A wardrobe pushed flat against a 21-day-old matte wall will print its outline into the film permanently, because the paint is still cross-linking and the wall cannot breathe behind it. Leave a 30-40 mm air gap, or wait the three weeks.

Two coats, one direction

Roll in 1 m squares from the ceiling down, and lay off each square with a single pass in the same direction. Before the second coat, check the wall with a raking light — a phone torch held at 15 degrees to the surface. Every dent, ripple and unfilled screw head will show as a shadow, and it is far cheaper to fix them now than after the second coat.

At 0.11 litres per square metre per coat, a 3.6 x 3.4 m bedroom with 2.4 m ceilings — four walls and a ceiling in the same colour — needs about 11 litres.

What matters here

• Matte hides wall defects but burnishes — keep it above hand height where you can.
• Wash old paint before recoating: skin oils and hairspray cause crawling.
• A 21-day cure matters in bedrooms because furniture prints into soft film.
• A phone torch at 15 degrees finds every defect before the second coat.

Elsewhere on this wall

• Chalk Wash in the palette
• Warm neutrals