Decorating Advice

[Accelebrate]

I've been renting a house short term whilst working in a new area, I'm moving out next week into some more permanent accommodation. Anyway the house I'm moving out of is a pretty basic terraced house with a pretty basic interior (it's pretty grim, but was dead handy location wise) every room is heavily woodchipped with magnolia walls and white ceilings.

To break up the monotony I stuck up a few family and travel photos and when I took them down it took most of the paint and quite a bit of woodchip with them. Not to worry, the letting agents painted the bathroom, kitchen and lounge after I'd moved in because I'd moaned about the state of them and I noticed they'd used Dulux magnolia for the walls, so I tootled off to B&Q and bought a tester pot of magnolia, slapped it over the missing bits on the walls and you'd never know anything was ever wrong. Brilliant.

Now tester pots are quite generous as it turns out so I decided to touch up a few places where paint was missing from stuff being carried up the stairs, bad idea. Turns out that the hall stairs and landing is a different, darker shade of magnolia to the rest of the house. I noticed this after it was too late and now have a load of patchy bits of paint which look a lot worse than when I started. To make matters worse I thought I might be able to fade the paint a bit by wiping at it with a damp sponge. End result is it looks pretty terrible and I feel a bit silly.

So, I don't really want to lose my deposit over it, the letting agents sent me a list of charges recently which included things like rubbish disposal at £60 a bin bag I also don't really want to spend much money on the place as it's in terrible condition anyway and I know that the even if I did cough up out of my deposit for the place to be repainted it wouldn't happen, some of the rooms have had the magnolia walls touched up with white gloss by previous tenants

As I see it there's a few ways of trying to fix it/improve it so it's passable when it's quickly checked over...

- Try and find another tester pot in a slightly darker shade that matches, they're cheap enough so I could buy just about every shade of magnolia I could find and see which one works.

- Repaint the hall stairs and landing? Could be done but I have no decorating gear here, mainly ladders so the landing could prove difficult.

- Just paint the wall next to the stairs. Not exactly good decorating, but the house is awash with bodges and bad paintwork so it wouldn't really show if one wall was a slightly different shade. It's quite a dark house as well, which helps.

Any other ideas/advice?

Edited by Accelebrate on Monday 4th August 14:53

[missliv]

Add a suitable layer of dirt to cover the joins by rubbing the arse of next door's cat on it or something.

[Accelebrate]

missliv said:

Add a suitable layer of dirt to cover the joins by rubbing the arse of next door's cat on it or something.

It's a possibility, there's usually a spare cat outside...

[anonymous-user]

Don't worry - your deposit will never get loose. You may lose it though

Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 4th August 14:50

[maxrider]

garyhun said:

Don't worry - you're deposit will never get loose. You may lose it though

"You are deposit...?"

[Accelebrate]

garyhun said:

Don't worry - your deposit will never get loose. You may lose it though

Edited by garyhun on Monday 4th August 14:50

Proof read

[anonymous-user]

Accelebrate said:

garyhun said:

Don't worry - your deposit will never get loose. You may lose it though

Edited by anonymous-user on Monday 4th August 14:50

Proof read

Actually could you not ask the landlord/agent which colour and buy another tester pot?

[Accelebrate]

garyhun said:

Accelebrate said:

garyhun said:

Don't worry - your deposit will never get loose. You may lose it though

Edited by garyhun on Monday 4th August 14:50

Proof read

Actually could you not ask the landlord/agent which colour and buy another tester pot?

I could, but it looks like it's been a fair few years since the hall was decorated and imagine whatever colour it started off as it's probably changed considerably over the years.

[fatboy18]

Im in this business, If you were one of our tenants, providing the place is left clean and tidy you would not loose your deposit However check with your Letting Agent, You have made an effort to patch up marks etc. The chances are the landlord will have the place redecorated once the place becomes empty anyway! The other alternitive is to take a small area of the original paint to a decorators merchant where they should be able to match the correct paint colour in a small can for you Good luck.

[Accelebrate]

fatboy18 said:

Im in this business, If you were one of our tenants, providing the place is left clean and tidy you would not loose your deposit However check with your Letting Agent, You have made an effort to patch up marks etc. The chances are the landlord will have the place redecorated once the place becomes empty anyway! The other alternitive is to take a small area of the original paint to a decorators merchant where they should be able to match the correct paint colour in a small can for you Good luck.

That's good to know, thanks. Whilst the letting agents seem to be pretty useless the landlord/business owner himself seems quite a nice chap, hopefully he'll be fair when it comes to moving out.