On walls, flat paints often look great, but don't stand up well to abuse and can be hard to scrub. Glossy paints are easier to maintain, but don't look "right" on many walls.
When it comes to bathrooms and kitchens you also have to consider how the paint looks, but also how easy it will be to clean and how it'll hold up to moisture.
A few weeks ago I posted a picture of the grease-buffet that is my kitchen ceiling above the stove. At that time, I was planning to try a few different cleaners to see what worked best for built-up grease.
I had some time to kill today so I figured this would a good day to give it a shot. The grease on the ceiling has probably been building up for at least a decade, and it was my guess that it wasn't going to go without a fight.
Wrong!
I started the cleaning with a standard Clorox cleaning wipe, and found that it worked perfectly well. The only down-side was that the wipes aren't that big and therefore didn't last that long. Here's the result from one wipe:
The ceiling had been painted in the past with what appears to be a Semi-Gloss paint. It's got at least a half-dozen coats of paint, so the sand texture is pretty smooth making it easy to clean. If it were a flat white there is no way it would have been this easy.
Now I'm pissed at myself for living with this disgusting mess on the ceiling for so long. If I had known it was going to clean up this easily I would have done it a year ago.
