IMHO, The difference between BM and Valspar is night and day. Its like comparing a Cadillac to a geo metro. BM is the best covering, easiest applying and most durable paint you can buy. The ONLY paint ive seen that comes close that is a lowes/home depot special is Behr. This is coming from a previous co-owner of a res/comm paint contracting business, so in other words, ive put gallons on in my day. I would recommend BM to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Sure, it might be a few more $$ /gallon, but you will save in the long run. laurielou56-It sounds to me like when you tried to paint the two bedrooms and had streaking and bad coverage, perhaps you painted latex over oil based. Not all latex primers will go over top oil based paint. You would need something like Benjamin Moore Fresh Start. Im not certain what the valspar line would be or if they even make one. Here is a way to test it, if the paint has been on for a few days, and you can take your fingernail and pick the paint off, odds are, you painted over oil. Im not saying this is the case, just a hunch cause 3 coats of primer and a coat of finish should hide just about anything. -Matt

High gloss to me looks really shiny no matter what kind of lighting you have. What about semi-gloss? Low lustre is very low shine and high gloss is very high shine. Semi-gloss is kind of in the middle.

My husband and I painted our whole house with Home Depot Behr Ultra Scuff Defense Stain Blocking paint and primer; flat for walls and ceilings, and satin for doors and moldings. We used fine quality paint brushes and rollers. The paint handled beautifully and is quite durable and looks great. We took our time, lightly sanded all doors and moldings first, washed and rinsed all walls and ceilings prior to painting. We did all the correct prep work. I even got a 10% military discount ( I am a retired Air Force Captain). Our house looks great! I have used BM and SW in past homes I lived in. BEHR is just as good. I painted my front door about 10 years ago, also with BEHR and it looks as good as the day I painted it. We since replaced our front door with a high end fiberglass door, and plan to paint it with BEHR when the pollen dies down in the air. I can also assure you that there is no professional painter that would have ever taken the time to do all the prep work my husband and I did prior to painting. We are semi retired and have the luxury to take the time to do a great paint job! I have read countless Houzz threads on botched professional paint jobs in expensive homes. As my Dad always says: if you want the job done right, do it yourself.

A lot of people wonder about the visualizers and the swatches you find online in general. It's a really good question. I'm sharing the following because I think it's important to understand the limits of digitized color - virtual color, online color or whatever you wanna call it. The most important thing you need to remember is this: How the paint colors look depends 100% on your device and nothing else. Digital paint colors will look different on each and every monitor, phone, tablet, laptop, etc. The color I see on my computer is not the same as the color you see on yours. Has absolutely nothing to do with color "in" the paint brand's viewers. No effort is made to ensure color accuracy with visualizer programs because the people who design them knows it doesn't matter. Because, again, how you see the paint colors depends on the device your using to view it and nothing else. The color space the visualizers work in is called RGB. In color science terms the RGB color space is ill-defined. Meaning (among other things) that the RGB color space makes no effort to mimic the human visual perception of color - how we see color in real life. Human visual perception is defined by 3 dimensions: hue, value and chroma. The RGB color space lacks TWO of those three; it lacks the dimensions of lightness and chromaticity (colorfulness/grayness). Thus, why the RGB color space is ill-defined. The RGB color space is strictly about lighting up three channels of light (red, green, and blue) to make a bunch of other colors. RGB values don't correlate to paint colors in any way whatsoever. Creating a sense of grayness or color nuance (which is lightness + saturation) digitally in the RGB colors space is very difficult. Because you're trying to "fake" a visual sense of grayness using a combination of red, green and blue channels of light on some kind of a device that is most likely not calibrated properly for displaying color. What all that means is the visualizers, any and all virtual renderings are inspirational at best. No one should mistake online visualizers or swatches for color "tools". The brands that offer a visualizer could be a lot more transparent about how it works, IMO. But the point of the visualizers is not to help the consumer, it's not meant to be a resource for color information. The visualizers are part of a marketing funnel designed to get you in a store to get chips where the staff can sell you paint and supplies.