Behr is decent. Sherwin-Williams is also really decent. Benjamin Moore Moor-Glo is the best if you really don't want to have to paint your house again; we've had it go 10 years in California sun and still match the color that comes out of the can. Valspar and Olympic suck; avoid at all costs.
Contractor grade is harder to apply properly, but is much cheaper... but you basically need a sprayer to apply it without it showing brush and roller marks. Or you need to be a really skilled painter that does this kind of thing regularly. I don't want to spend $300 on a spray rig because the labor involved in spraying is mostly masking and I can paint my whole house in about four hours with a roller, and I'm not a skilled painter. So things end up looking really crappy when I use contractor grade paint.
As usual, it's a tradeoff between values. On one hand, you have what you spend on the paint. On the other hand, you have things like color retention, UV resistance, ease of application, mold resistance, and finish quality. These are all subtle things that not many people value. The penalties of using cheap paint are the "kick the can down the road" type -- you will, for instance, have to power wash and repaint the house sooner if you use cheap paint. If you have to paint a specific spot where something scraped the siding three years later, it may not match if you used cheap paint, because the color has faded. Using good paint is much more important if you are painting a dark color like the taupe that my house is painted, as dark colors with more pigment are more prone to fading under UV light. With a light beige like a sand color, you can cheap a little bit on the paint. But beiges are really hard to color match.
The thing that sucks most is when you discover a mismatch, either because the paint on the wall has faded or because you're using paint from a different can/batch than you originally used on that wall. You end up painting the entire wall of the house again to hide a single spot.
Pro Tips:
- Use Satin, don't use flat or semi-gloss. Dirt sticks to flat. Semi-gloss will show every brush mark as a reflection.
- Buy more paint than you need based on sq ft caluclations. Especially with colors where subtle differences are easily apparent like beiges and browns, you want all the paint base (the stuff in the cans) to come from the same batch and you want all the tint (the stuff they add in the paint store) to come from the same machine at the same time or you'll get color differences.
- If you're painting from cans and doing a large area, buy a 5 gallon bucket with a lid and mix all of the cans together before you start painting. This eliminates the chances of you having a color mismatch because they mixed the cans differently. If you find that you need to buy more paint, don't let the 5 gallon bucket get below 2 gallons; you can buy more paint and add them at that point and colors will still match across the board in most cases.
Behr's still in my category of 'cheap paint.' Sherwin Williams premium grade is not 'cheap paint'; Sherwin Williams contractor grade is. Same with Benjamin Moore.
