How Do You Match Paint Already on the Wall

Matching the existing paint of your rental property when getting it rent-ready can be the difference between spending a week painting or paying thousand of dollars for a painter.

If you have a perfect match of the existing paint color, you can be done in one day even if you have to repaint the entire walls, because as we all know the most time-consuming part is the cutting in. 

I discovered this method after a lot of trials and errors so you are getting the benefit of my 14 years of experience as a property maintenance professional.

I also want to mention that this method works even when trying to match white paint, which is especially handy for matching ceiling paint.

Please don’t bother with any paint match apps, they may be OK for matching your pillow color but will do nothing to match the existing wall paint color. The same goes for picking up a whole bunch of samples to figure out which color is the one you need.

I assume you are reading this article because you have a project and you need to finish fast and save money. 

Here is what I do to match the existing paint.

Take a sample from the wall that you are working on. What I like to do is take the sample from an area that’s not visible, for example behind the fridge or inside the closet.

I want to be able to conceal our patchwork as much as possible. Generally, I can take a little section straight out of the wall. 

After experimenting with taking paint samples from different sections, I found that the best match is from the corner where two walls meet. The reason for this as explained to me by a specialist is that there is no dark color under the paint. When I cut from the corner I usually get paint color on top of drywall tape which is a light color and this evidently doesn’t interfere with the spectrometer.

When you take the sample, you don’t want to cut it all the way through the drywall. There is no need to repair drywall after you paint. Also taking a piece from the entire drywall can give you inaccurate results.

Take the sample down to Home Depot or your paint store and ask them to match it. Paint stores use a spectrometer that beams light into the sample. The light is reflected back off the sample and into a highly efficient color analyzer.

The key to getting a good match is having a good sample. That’s why cutting a piece of the drywall is not a good idea. The drywall has a darker paper behind the surface paper and for some reason, it influences the result of the color match. 

You only need to cut the surface paper with the color of the paint on there. 

So I’m just going to show quickly how to remove your little sample piece from the drywall.

So what we’re going to do, take our utility knife. We just want to score a little rectangle out there. You don’t want to go too deep. We just want enough to be able to remove that out of paper. Make sure you’ve cut it all the way through remembering we’re going to be patching this section here later on.

Now, what I’d like to do is take the blade, work that from one edge. So just push that in. Pop that little corner, go back down to the bottom. Pop the little corner. Step it down the bottom. Again, pop that little corner place work all the way around until it just simply pops off. So we’ve got one little section up here holding on.

Once that’s done, that becomes my new sample base to take into the local hardware store. 

Samples with texture or sheen will be more difficult to match but not impossible. It’s a good idea to ask the paint store employee to do the color match twice to make sure the reading is good. I know my local Home Depot employees and they always oblige but if they are busy it’s a tough ask.

You need to cut at least 1” x 1” to get a color match but I like to cut a larger sample if possible because, after I get the paint color I dot a little on the sample and wait for it to dry. If it’s not correct, I ask them to do it again.

Sometimes no matter what I do I can’t match the paint completely but as long as I am very close I can paint a house in one day with an 18” roller if I don’t have to cut in.

In addition to getting a sample from the wall, you can take a look where you can find the same paint. Sometimes people paint over doorstops, power outlet covers, and other hard surfaces.   

If you can find somewhere that you don’t have to patch, it’s even better.  I‘ve found that color samples from solid surfaces like an outlet cover gives me a better match. The negative is that the surface is smaller and I can’t test it in the paint store.

Try this method and I guarantee you an almost perfect match every time.