I Own A Cleaning Company. You Cannot Scrub A Mark Off A Flat Wall.

there is a mark on your wall. you are going to get a cloth damp, put something on it, and rub until the mark is gone. the mark will go. and then there will be a slightly shiny patch where the mark used to be, shaped like your hand, and that patch is not coming out.

i own a cleaning company. the thing i want to tell you about walls is not a trade secret — it is printed on the websites of the companies that make the paint, in the section they file under problems, and almost nobody goes looking there before they start scrubbing.

the word for it is burnishing

sherwin-williams has a page for it. they list four causes, and i am going to print them the way they wrote them, because the second one is the whole post: use of a flat paint in high-traffic areas, where a higher sheen level would be more durable. frequent washing and spot cleaning with an abrasive cleaner. heavy objects (furniture, for example) rubbing against the walls. use of paint that has a low resistance to scrubbing.

frequent washing. not wrong washing. washing.

sheen is just how much light a surface throws back at you in one direction instead of scattering it in every direction. a flat finish is built to scatter. its surface is deliberately not smooth. when you rub it hard, you make it smoother, and smoother means it starts bouncing light instead of diffusing it. nothing was removed and nothing was added. the shape of the surface changed.

which is why no cleaner on earth fixes a burnished patch. it is not a stain. there is nothing on the wall. the fix for it is paint.

this is the same category of problem as etching a countertop — you are not failing to remove something, you are changing a surface, and changed surfaces do not wash back.

the part where i trust a paint company and the part where i do not

both of my sources here sell paint, so read them the way you would read anybody with a stake. sherwin-williams’s first listed cause is that you used flat paint where you should have used a higher sheen, which is a sentence that ends with you buying paint. i am not taking that one.

what i am taking is everything they publish that keeps you from repainting, because that is the advice that costs them something. sherwin-williams, on cleaning marks: use a soft cloth or sponge with water or a general-purpose household cleaner. and this, which is the line nobody has ever read in time: to assure maximum washability and durability, wait at least two weeks before washing the dry paint film.

two weeks. new paint in a nursery, somebody puts a hand on it in week one, you wipe it, and you have just put a mark on a wall that was three days old.

never put glass cleaner on a wall

this one is benjamin moore, and it is the most useful sentence i found: never use glass cleaner or a heavy-duty household spray cleaner on a painted wall. they contain strong solvents that can damage the finish.

i buy sprayway glass cleaner for work and i will keep buying it, and i am linking it here specifically to say that it stays on glass and mirrors and nowhere near a painted wall. it is very good at the job it has. a wall is not that job.

same for the razor scraper, which is in my regular rotation and earns its place on shower glass. a blade near paint is a repair, not a clean.

and bar keepers friend is oxalic acid plus a fine abrasive, which makes it two of the four things on the burnishing list at once. it belongs on a stainless sink. the white foam block people reach for in a panic is also an abrasive, and it is doing the exact thing sherwin-williams warns about.

where my two sources disagree, and which way i am going

sherwin-williams says water or a general-purpose household cleaner. benjamin moore says never a heavy-duty household spray. those are not the same instruction, and the gap between them is where most people’s spray bottle lives.

i am taking the cautious reading. the natural multi-surface cleaner i buy is the mildest cleaner i own and i would still put it on the cloth rather than on the wall, diluted, and i would not leave it sitting there. it is not the first thing i would reach for on paint, and i would not reach for anything stronger at all.

the first thing is warm water. and after that, warm water with a drop of dish soap in it. that is benjamin moore’s own recommendation and it uses nothing you do not already own, which is the pattern on this blog by now — see vinegar, which people believe in precisely because it is a weak acid, and which is a terrible idea on anything it can eat.

the actual method, in order

dust it first, dry. benjamin moore says to use the brush attachment on your vacuum to lift surface dust before any water touches the wall, and skipping this step means your first wet pass is dragging grit across paint. the vent brush with the vacuum attachment i keep for dryer ducts is the right shape for this and the wrong label — it is a soft round brush on a hose fitting, which is exactly what a wall wants, and it has now done more jobs on this blog than are printed on its box.

then warm water, a soft cloth, and their two rules: clean the wall from the bottom up to prevent streaks from running down, and rub gently in a circular motion; do not scrub too hard. let the water do it. a pack of auto-aisle microfiber cloths is what i buy for work and what i would use here — the car-care aisle sells the same cloth as the cleaning aisle and nobody has told the cleaning aisle.

rinse out of a second bucket of clean water, and then dry the wall. drying is not optional and it is the step everyone drops. viva paper towels are what i buy for drying because they behave like cloth, and a wall left damp is a wall growing something. spraying and wiping is the habit this replaces.

the mark that has soaked in

for something that has gone into the film rather than sitting on it, sherwin-williams suggests diluted household bleach with a clean-water rinse afterward. that is their call, not mine, and it is worth knowing that the people who made the paint will sign off on it.

two things about that. plain chlorine bleach in a jug is the product i want to hand you here and i do not have a link for one, so go buy it wherever you buy it. and bleach goes in water and in nothing else, ever — not with an acid, not with an ammonia cleaner, not with the other spray bottle because the first one was not working. that mistake is the one that puts people in an emergency room and it takes about ten seconds.

wear nitrile gloves for that step. the listing defaults to small, so change the size before you check out.

and if the mark is soot rather than a handprint, that is a different job with a different answer, and i wrote it up when i went looking at why candles mark walls. do not scrub that one either.

the one sentence to keep

benjamin moore puts it better than i can: the higher the gloss or sheen, the easier to clean. the lower the sheen, the gentler you should be.

so go and find out what is on your walls before you wash them. flat and matte in the bedrooms, usually something with a sheen in the kitchen and the bathroom and on the trim. the bathroom wall will take a real clean. the hallway where everybody’s hand goes will not, and that is the wall you were about to go at hardest.

i am not going to tell you how many years of wall life this saves, because nobody publishes that number and i would be making it up.

some of the links above are affiliate links, which means i may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no cost to you. #ad #WalmartPartner — five of the eight products here are things i buy for my own company: the microfiber, the viva, the multi-surface cleaner, the sprayway glass and the razor scraper. three of those five are linked specifically to tell you where they must not go. the bar keepers friend and the vent brush i have linked on what they are made of and what shape they are, not on a personal history with them, and the one product i most want to hand you — a plain jug of bleach — i have no link for at all.