In this article we will discuss everything you need to know to roll the walls inside your house, even if you have never done it before.
When you use a paint roller to paint your walls, the motion in your arms should be as smooth and rhythmic as using a vacuum cleaner. There will be a pushing and pulling action that you repeat as you move along the wall. Whenever possible, you want each stroke to be the full height of the wall. This skill is the foundation on which to build your painting game.
A 9 inch all white woven, line free roller sleeve with a 1/2 inch nap is going to be the workhorse for most of your interior painting projects. A premium quality sleeve will cost about $5 and is well worth the money. If you are painting interior walls or ceilings that are textured you will likely want to use a sleeve with a 3/4” nap. Typically, anything thicker than a 3/4” nap will create way too many paint spatters. If you are rolling doors a 3/8” nap will give the best results.
An important item to note is that some manufacturers, such as Sherwin Williams, have extensively tested different roller sleeves with each of their paints for best results. In their stores you will often see a display indicating which sleeve is recommended for a particular paint. From my own experience, I suggest that you take their advice and go with the sleeve that they officially recommend for the paint that you will be using.
I once bought a pack of roller sleeves that were white with a blue spiral stripe. I used them to roll walls with a deep red paint. There was so much tint in the paint to achieve the deep color that the solids in the paint acted somewhat like the shag of a carpet with the ability to create patterns in the finish. In this case, the blue spiral stripe around the roller sleeve imparted a pattern into the dried paint film. Thankfully, it was easily fixed by changing to the recommended roller sleeve and rolling another coat.
There are many different types of roller sleeves out there. I’ve never been too happy with yellow woven sleeves for interior work as they tend to shed a lot of lint. There are also micro fiber sleeves that produce excellent results, however, for the beginner I recommend the white woven lint free. I once used a sleeve with a pile that looked like a heavy shag rug from the 70’s. It literally looked like a bunch of string attached to the plastic tube. The finish on the wall was incredible, but it spattered paint like an Amazon rain storm and so I never used it again.