How do i know what paint color and paint type is on my walls?

some areas need touch ups but i have no idea what exact color the previous owners used on the walls.


i do not want to repaint everything, just touchups here and there.


there is no way of contacting the prev owners. it was bank-owned.How do i know what paint color and paint type is on my walls?
Take a chip of it to Wal-Mart and match it to a sample, or have them mix up some for you- gloss? matte?. You can probably get close, but it may be best just to do one entirely fresh coat.How do i know what paint color and paint type is on my walls?
Just so you know, even if you had the exact name, brand and sheen, this will not match. If you are trying to be too precise, you will end up probably spending more time and money instead of just painting everything. good luck.
Go to paint store and get some sample paint chips. Find the one closest to your color. Buy a small amount or sample bottle. Make the touchups.
Peel a little chunk of the wall and bring it to Home Depot or Lowe's. They can match it up with their computer.
It's most likely latex (water-based) paint unless it was painted decades ago. You can figure out the sheen from getting a sheen chart from a paint store or from anywhere that sells paint. The most common sheens for interior walls are flat, eggshell, satin, and semi-gloss. If the paint has absolutely no shine to it, it's flat. If it has a minimal amount of shine but doesn't seem to reflect light, it's eggshell. Satin reflects light and has some shine but does not appear at all glossy. And semi-gloss is self-described: it's glossy, but when compared to something that's really high gloss, it doesn't appear as glossy.





Most places that sell paint will do color-matching. All you'll need to take is a chip of paint no larger than 1 inch by 1 inch. If you can carefully remove a paint chip about that size from by one of the spots that you need to touch up, that will work great. Take your paint chip to a paint store, and tell them that you want it color-matched, and be sure to tell them that you are doing touch-ups and you need the exact color.





You might want to take a sheen chart home with you and hold it up to your wall to decide what sheen it is rather than try to compare you little paint chip to the sheen chart at the store. If the sheen is too different from what's on the wall already, that will be more noticeable than if the color isn't 100% exact.





When you get home with your color-matched paint, paint one of the areas that needs touching up. Let it dry--you can speed this up by using a hair dryer on it. If you're satisfied, and it looks good, then go ahead and do the rest of your touch-ups. If the color is slightly off to where it's noticeable, take the paint back to the store along with you paint chip and tell them you need the color adjusted. Let them know whether it was too light or dark, or had too much red in it or whatever the difference in color was. They should be able to adjust it to make it exact. Most stores that have color-matching readers advertise that they can match any color. Hold them to their word.





One other thing: if you go to a hardware store or paint store specifically, it is likely that the employee matching the paint for you will have a lot more experience than employees at Walmart that have simply been trained on how to mix paint. If the color needs tweeking slightly, you'll have better luck at a hardware store or paint store.





In Consumer Reports a few of the top-ranking paints are Behr (sold at Home Depot), Valspar (sold at Lowe's), and Kilz (this ranks #1 and is sold at Walmart, so the person mixing paint might not know as much as someone somewhere else, but this is still worth considering-it's a good price). Expensive paints like Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore rank mediocre or even poor in Consumer Reports magazine. You shouldn't need to spend any more than $25 a gallon for a top-performing paint.





I hope this helps. Good luck!