Paint

Four cheap paints on the same wall

Under $30 a gallon, rolled the same day by the same person, photographed at 24 and 72 hours.

By Frances Delacroix · August 1, 2026

My lease says the walls come back "in the condition received," and the condition received was a beige that had gone gray in the corners. The landlord does not pay for paint. I do, out of the same money I would like back as a security deposit in two years, so I buy cheap paint and I have opinions about which cheap paint.

Four gallons under $30, bought in one trip up Route 9. One wall in a second-floor apartment on Pleasant Street in Easthampton. One Saturday, because Saturday is when I have a day.

How the test ran

The wall is 14 feet by 8 feet, north-facing, original 1911 plaster with a skim coat somebody put on badly in the nineties. There is a radiator under the left third of it. I taped the wall into four sections about three and a half feet wide.

Two days before I painted, I rolled a 12-inch square of leftover dark gray porch paint into the middle of each section and let it cure. That square is the coverage test. Every renter in this valley has a patch on the wall that is a different color from the wall.

New 3/8-inch nap cover for each paint, new tray liner, same 9-inch frame. Room was 71 degrees with both windows open. First coat at 10 a.m., second coat at 12:30. I laid a white drop cloth under each section and counted the spatter on it afterward, which is a dumb-sounding number that turns out to predict how annoyed you will be at 3 p.m.

Photos at 24 hours and again at 72, both at 9 a.m. in the same north light. Prices are what I paid in July at the Home Depot in Hadley and the Lowe's on King Street in Northampton, all four in a plain white or an off-white base with no tint.

1. Kilz Complete Coat interior flat, $25.48

This is the kind of white that gets rolled on apartment walls between tenants all over Hampshire County, and you can tell. It loads heavy and goes on with almost no drag, which made the first coat fast, about eleven minutes for my section. Spatter was moderate, 22 drops on the cloth, most of them fine.

Lap marks are the problem. It sets up quickly and does not let you go back into an edge after ninety seconds, so if you stop to answer the door you will see where you stopped. I saw two soft vertical bands at 24 hours near the radiator, where the wall is warmer and the paint flashed faster. They were still there at 72 hours, fainter, visible if you stand at the window and look sideways. The gray square was gone after two coats. Fine paint for the money. Roll it in one go and do not take a call.

2. Glidden Essentials flat, $19.98

The cheapest gallon in the test and the one I would tell you to leave on the shelf.

It rolls like skim milk. Thin enough that it ran down the frame onto my wrist twice, and the spatter count was 61, the highest number I have ever written down for a wall paint. Coverage over the gray square after two coats was a soft ghost you could see from the doorway. It took a third coat to kill it, and the third coat left the surface looking chalky where I had worked it.

At 72 hours the section had dried to a slightly duller sheen than the others, and it burnished where I brushed against it carrying the ladder out. A wall that marks when you look at it is a wall you paint again before you move. Glidden sells this as a budget line and it is priced honestly. It is still the wrong gallon for a wall with anything on it.

3. Behr Premium Plus eggshell, $29.98

Most expensive of the four by four dollars and worth the four dollars. It is also two cents under the rule for this test, which made the rule feel a little silly.

It is thicker in the tray and it wants a slower arm, but it stays open long enough to fix a mistake. I stopped for four minutes in the middle of the first coat to move the radiator cover and came back into the wet edge with no line at all. Spatter was 9 drops, the lowest here. Dry to touch in 45 minutes, recoat at two hours as the can says, and it did not lift.

The gray square was fully covered at two coats with no ghost in any light I could find, including a flashlight held flat against the plaster, which is unfair and I did it anyway. The eggshell does show a trowel ridge in the old skim coat that the flats hide, and I will take that trade for a wall I can wipe with a sponge. Buy this one.

4. Valspar Simplicity matte, $25.98

Valspar sells Simplicity as the easy one, and it does behave. Good build, no drips, 17 drops of spatter. It covered the gray square in two coats with a faint edge showing where I had rolled thinner near the ceiling.

The smell is the complaint. Sharper than the other three, and it was still noticeable in the room Sunday morning with the windows open all night. If you sleep in the room you paint, and in a one-bedroom you do, take that seriously and plan the night. At 72 hours the finish was uniform and dead flat, which reads clean on a ceiling and reads like a school hallway on a wall.

What I would buy on a Saturday

Behr Premium Plus, and I would buy one gallon more than the calculator on the can says, because valley plaster drinks paint and because touching up in October with a gallon bought in August is how you end up with two whites.

Skip Glidden Essentials. The ten dollars you save goes straight into the third coat and the extra hour.

Two practical notes. Tape around the radiator before you start and pull it while the paint is still soft, because dried latex on a cast iron rib comes off in flakes and takes the old finish with it. And if your plaster has hairline cracks, none of these four bridge them. Nothing at this price does. Fill them, sand them Friday night, paint them Saturday.