The off-white walls in my kitchen are badly marked up. What can I do to freshen them up?

Restore your off-white kitchen walls without repainting! Learn safe, effective methods to clean vinyl silk paint and banish marks for a fresh look.

Using a white microfibre or cotton cloth, work it over the problem areas of the walls lightly. Ensure you don’t over-wet the cloth at any point.

Question: The off-white walls in my kitchen/diner are badly marked up, and I don’t want to repaint them. What can I do to clean and freshen them up? I think the paint is a vinyl silk.

Answer: With pale neutral paintwork, the slings and arrows of domestic life, especially in busy areas like the kitchen, don’t take long to spoil the finish of our walls. 

Dogs love to rub their bodies along the length of the wall on a frolicking return through the back door, and everything children eat seems to have an explosive quality. Something that’s not well understood is that paint oxidises over several years out of the can. As the surface changes, the colour and finish can discreetly change too. Touch-ups, even with exactly the same paint, will appear altered in both texture and colour. Attacking the walls with the wrong cleaning technique can dull and damage areas that will drive you mad every time you see them. If you don’t want to repaint completely, let’s start with getting the major stains softly and safely off the surface.

We talked about washing walls a few weeks ago, so hopefully, we all understand that extensive, dripping wall washing as seen on CleanTok can prove disastrous. Dribbling water and detergents can get behind baseboards, under flooring, into underlays, and over time, this could lead to mould growth and damage to even laminate flooring sections. However, cleaning the right way with a damp dust is a great place to start. A step ladder is useful here, and if you have high walls, do this chore when someone else is home to steady your ladder. Start with a soft, long or pan brush, just dusting the walls and ceiling down to remove loose debris (don’t belt them). Swipe the baseboards and give the floor a quick brush so that you’re starting with a clean room and not lifting airborne rubbish as you move around. We don’t want to smear anything around the walls while we work.

Put one tiny press of washing-up liquid into a bucket of warm water. Using a white microfibre or cotton cloth (to avoid any colour transfer) or a soft sponge - dunk and fully wring the cloth or sponge out. Work it over the problem areas of the walls lightly. Ensure you don’t over-wet the cloth at any point. With vinyl silk, there is some leeway in scrubbing very lightly. Leave the solution on the stains for just a few minutes and wipe off with a soft, dry cloth. With a truly flat matt, the danger is that you would be left with a clouded landscape if the walls were painted some years ago and you use too much moisture or inappropriate additives during the cleaning. So, now to the hard stuff. Before you start, place a dry white cloth under the area you’re working (hold it in there with a free hand if you have to) and avoid dribbling the excess from your work further down the walls.

Most food and oily splatters will melt with a little heat, so we're going to work just the same way, just with a little more heat in our damp cloth. Scrub-Daddies and other magic erasers are not appropriate and will rub the texture of the thin layer of water-based paint, leaving a permanent mark. Dulux advise when it comes to oil stains and very shiny paint, “For glossy finishes, which are less durable when it comes to cleaning, avoid harsh substances and consider using heat instead. Place an absorbent cloth over the oil stain and heat the cloth with an iron on its lowest heat setting. The heat should emulsify the oil so that it soaks into the cloth.” Obviously, be extremely careful when using any form of direct heat. Whatever you’re attempting, don’t scrub or gouge the wall. The edge of a credit card, applied very gently, can lift stubborn marks, but keep it almost flush to the wall – don’t dig in.

Another useful little hack for cleaning scrub-friendly walls weekly of crayon, egg, pencil, mung, and muck is toothpaste (white, please) and a soft toothbrush. Put the toothpaste on the brush, dunk it in warm water, and have a soft scrub at the stain. Wipe the area down with your white cloth to remove any residue. With the exception of thin, fragile, super matt heritage like paints, a bicarbonate of soda paste can be used as a very light rub. Again, keep the pressure super light. Just put a couple of tablespoons of food-grade bicarbonate of soda into a bowl and add enough water to make a firm paste. Using a circular motion on your soft, white cloth, work over the stain until it lifts. Finish with a wipe of clean water on a well-wrung-out cloth. For crayon, WD-40, sprayed on a cloth, can sometimes work on a washable surface. Don’t scrub down harshly and wipe clean with clean water and a soft cloth.

Going forward, if possible, address stains and smears as they happen and crucially before they harden. When you come to redecorate, choose washable paint - eggshells, satins, and silk paints with stain-resistant technology, that can take a wet wipe and a good scrub in those busy family rooms. Anything with a low sheen level of 2% to 10% can provide problems when cleaning it, so look out for products intended for light cleaning with soap and a little water and scrub-resistance (don’t harshly attack any paintwork, all the same). Expect days-old wine, coffee, tea and an ink pen to provide the greatest challenge, even with a washable wonder paint. Where you do find you have to clean something off a matt surface, sooner rather than later is the key. There are products out there to give that almost flat finish without the compromise of staining, some 50 times more washable than typical matt emulsion paint. These include Dulux EasyCare Washable Matt, Fleetwood EasyClean Washable Matt, and Crown EasyClean Matt, with prices from €15 - €18 per litre.