Paint Record Card

Why this one is worth printing

Of all the sheets here this is the one that pays off latest and largest. Touching up a wall takes ten minutes if you know the color and half a day if you do not — you are into test pots, or repainting the whole wall to the nearest corner because the match is slightly off.

It costs nothing to write down at the time. It is nearly impossible to reconstruct later.

What to record, and the two fields people miss

The obvious ones are brand, color name, code and date. The two that get left off and matter:

The sheen. Flat, eggshell, satin, semi-gloss. The same color in a different sheen is a visible patch — the color matches and the light does not, which somehow looks worse than a wrong colour. If you record one thing beyond the name, record this.

The tinting base. Color is mixed into a base, and the same color name can be carried on more than one. The counter needs the base as well as the code to match it exactly. It is printed on the original tin lid and nowhere else.

Also worth a line: the quantity you actually used, which tells you whether our paint calculator was right for your walls, and whether the wall was primed and with what, because that changes how a touch-up behaves.

Where to keep it

Taped inside a cupboard door, the back of the airing cupboard, or the inside of the utility room door. Somewhere fixed to the house rather than filed in a drawer, because the point of this sheet is that it survives moving house, losing the folder and forgetting it exists.

A photograph of it on your phone is a good backup, but paper taped to the building is the version that is still there in 2035.

One sheet does a house

Twenty rows on the printed card and twenty-four in the spreadsheet, which covers most homes with room for repaints. Record the room and the surface separately — walls, ceiling and trim in one room are usually three different products, and the trim is the one you will need first.