Washing down walls & ceilings
Before repainting — or to skip it — walls get washed: hand marks, furniture halos, nicotine, light soot. A well-run wash-down changes a room without a single tin of paint.
The right gesture
Every paint has its own wash
Everything starts with a discreet test: satin or gloss paint can take a real wash-down; a matt or old distemper demands a far lighter hand, on pain of burnishing or washing out. Product, dilution and pressure are set by that test.
The work goes bottom-up — counter-intuitive, but it prevents runs on dry walls, impossible to fix — then rinses top-down. Ceilings, door frames, skirting and radiators follow, because a clean wall mercilessly exposes everything that isn't.
As paint preparation, the wash-down conditions adhesion: painters hand us this step to start on a sound surface. In the "avoid repainting" version, nicotine and halos come off in most cases — and when the paint is too far gone, we say so before, not after.
Wall washing: technical questions
In most cases yes, with a suitable degreaser and several rinse waters. On very old yellowing it has sometimes migrated into the paint film: washing improves, but only an isolating primer settles everything — we will tell you at the test.
Clean walls, with or without paint to follow
Surface, paint type, goal: the on-site test shows what the wash will deliver.