You're expecting way too much. If you had the original can of
paint, it would probably not be dead on out in the middle of a
wall. Any touch up painting will always require painting corner
to corner, top to bottom.

--
______________________________
Keep the whole world singing . . . .
DanG (remove the sevens)




"N8N" wrote in message
...
On Nov 4, 10:45 am, Jim Elbrecht wrote:
On Wed, 4 Nov 2009 07:18:28 -0800 (PST), N8N

wrote:

On Nov 4, 7:53 am, "dadiOH" wrote:
Red Green wrote:
Like to add, when touching up even from an original can,
blend/fog by
running the brush/roller virtually dry way past the area
being done.
Differences are harder to notice.

IME and IMO this is the best solution for the OP assuming
that the new paint
color is pretty close. One can also feather out by diluting
the paint.

It's not at all, that's the problem. I've had three different
batches
of paint mixed and only one was close enough to even try
putting it on
the wall, and it is clearly different - patches look like
shadows.

I guess I just don't repaint often enough-- or maybe too often--
but
in 50 years of home-owning and doing my own painting, I don't
recall a
single time that I tried to paint part of a wall-- and only a
handful
of times that I painted less than the entire room.

We bought a very old house a couple years ago, and the PO's
repainted
before the sale - and they apparently were big fans of mounting
stuff
on the wall (e.g. mirrors etc.) and were NOT big fans of removing
things like light fixtures, mirrors, switch plates, etc. when
repainting. So for an example, when we had air conditioning
installed
and had the old round thermostat replaced with a new programmable
one,
there was an ugly exposed area of old paint, mounting holes, etc.
left
behind with a big ridge of brush marks showing the outline of the
old
thermostat. Likewise, they'd glued pieces of mirror on the wall
in
the living room to conceal the old electrical boxes for wall
sconces;
when I ripped those down to install new sconces I've got more
ugliness. (but I still have to take the big mirror - mounted like
a
bathroom mirror, with clips - down over the mantel, which will
cause
another big mess-o-ugliness) In each case there's enough brush
marks,
holes, etc. that most of these areas get a skim coat of drywall
mud,
primer, etc.

Once I've got enough of these really egregious trouble spots done,
then we'll likely go ahead and repaint whole walls or rooms, but
I'm
just trying to keep the house from looking like a perpetual
construction site while this is going on.

nate