Satin Impervo Waterborne for me. Oil is great also but it yellows over time , smells bad and is a pain in the butt to clean up, and the waterborne looks and feels just like the oil, so there you go.

There is a third option, BM Advance. It's a water based alkyd. It applies and flows like SI but low VOC and little smell. Still takes a while to fully cure and may yellow slightly (not an issue unless you are going with white) but has the look of SI. Whatever you choose, let the shelves and mantle cure thoroughly (a few weeks) before you put anything on them.

I'm trying to decide between oil Impervo and Advance for the trims. They've been primed with BM Alkyd primer. The color will be cream white. I don't care about drying time, smell, or yellowing. Which one is going to have a more smooth and tough surface? oil or advance? only considering BM because there's a store 2 blocks away. Thanks guys.

take you're pick

I painted my mantle and fireplace surround with Satin Impervo, and it looks lovely. However, for durability for doors, baseboards, trim that will get scuffed and cleaned, NO waterbased finish that I have tested even comes close to alkyd enamel. We have a very light off-white alkyd enamel on door or trim that has not yellowed in rooms with windows. In rooms without any windows at all, it yellowed slightly.

I've painted some items that needed to hold up to extreme wear conditions (UV rays, salt water, extreme abrasion, plus the paint needed to bond to a surface designed to be solvent- and abrasion-resistant). I used alkyd enamel and the best acrylics I could find, and there was absolutely no comparison.

Latex is terrible paint for anything you care about. It's soft, it can't be prepped well for the next coat when it gets old; it takes months to "cure" even though it dries in an hour; it does not, by any means, look or feel anything like a good oil paint, in fact, in humid weather it can get very sticky, and there's virtually no way to get it to totally level out into that classic "satin impervo" look no matter how much Floetrol you put in it or how expensive a brush you use, though if you have a painter skilled in laying on latex they can get close, though with significantly more effort, or if you spry it, but spraying forces you to reduce it so much it degrades the paint. Downsides: oil does take overnight to dry, the solvents are not healthy to breathe; cleaning brushes takes an inordinate amount of thinner and slop buckets. Upsides: if you hire a good painter, you'll get a finish head and shoulders above latex. If I were doing a really nice interior, I'd be reluctant to slop latex on all that nice wood detail. As a former painting contractor, I can tell latex a mile away. I personally hate using oil, but I would never defend latex as great, or even particularly good, paint. Also note that if you can even get Ben Moore Satin Impervo oil in gallons, it has been reduced to high quality sludge through the removal of a lot of the solvents (VOCs) that made is so good. So be prepared to doctor it up with thinner or conditioners (Penetrol). The Impervo they sell in quarts to get past the VOC laws ("for metal only") is actually thin enough to paint with right out of the can.

AS for yellowing, it does yellow with time but we're talking 15 to 20 years time--I have done over many many oil-based interiors, and the yellowing was kind of nice, if you were to ask me. I don't know what happened with the commenter above, no idea. Definitely not the norm.

I feel especially strongly about porch and floor paint. The latex versions can be truly awful, the, wierdly, the Behr stuff I've used isn't half bad. The old Ben Moore porch and floor oil was so good a floor could last for 10 or more years and retain that super smooth, oil-paint glow. I recently painted a bathroom floor with Ben Moore latex floor paint and it was hands down the worst paint I've ever used. Didn't even pretend to level out, or cover, didn't tool well--basically was like vandalizing my own floor, a real puzzle since Ben Moore (and Pratt and Lambert) used to be the gold standards. You can still get Dutch and European paints in oil that are great, but you're talking major $$. Some companies like Kirby's in New Bedford have nice oil paints but they're too soft for floors, otherwise really nice paint with thinner and/or Penetrol.

How is latex a terrible paint to paint over after it gets old? You barely need to do anything to it to prepare it for re-painting, unlike oil based paint which you need to sand very well and/or prime. Also, I spray latex through my sprayer all the time with no thinning. If you have to thin your paint, you need to upgrade your machine.

That whole post was just so wrong on many levels