Patching over holes in the wall after moving. What is standard?

[earthfriendly]

The ex-owner (of our present home) tried to cover up areas of imperfection on the wall with the original paint and you can see where he desparately tried to do the patching. Paint, even when kept in its original can, deteriorates over time. We ended up just painting the entire room.

For the OP's case, it is a tiny patch and you can google on brush stroke techniques on how to camouflage it.

[ecureilx]

For the OP's case, it is a tiny patch and you can google on brush stroke techniques on how to camouflage it.

you are missing the point. Since the LL knows about the holes, he will go with a magnifying glass and find it

Oops...

[earthfriendly]

For OP's future rental . When we were renting apartments in the USA, the rule was very clear that we could not knock anything into the wall. But apartments are commercially-managed. Not too sure about how private landlords operate.

[Strong Eagle]

We found new tenants for our LL in Singapore... wasn't hard to do as most semi-D's are in demand. The new tenants asked that we leave our mounting points for them. Problem solved.

[maneo]

Usually the picture frame leaves dust/soot marks around it’s edge on the wall. Being soot it’s hard to remove. Harder still in SG with it’s prevalence of unwashable cheap paint. The soot marks on the wall will risk telling the LL precisely where to look for repaired holes.]

Have found cleaning with some cleanser (e.g. Soft Scrub) on the soft side of a wet sponge works fairly well on soot marks, scratches, etc. Avoid using the coarse scrub side of the sponge.

-- apols for the broken formatting - I checked, but I cannot for the life of me see what is causing it [sigh]

Like parentheses in an Excel formula, each "[quote=''userID'']" must have a matching "[/quote]" and there can be no extraneous nor missing brackets.

[maneo]

The ex-owner (of our present home) tried to cover up areas of imperfection on the wall with the original paint and you can see where he desparately tried to do the patching. Paint, even when kept in its original can, deteriorates over time. We ended up just painting the entire room.

For the OP's case, it is a tiny patch and you can google on brush stroke techniques on how to camouflage it.

While there may be some separation of paint kept in an airtight container, this can be remedied with thorough stirring or shaking.
As long as the inside of the paint container has not rusted, the paint should be OK.
Usually it's the colour of the paint on the wall that changes with time (e.g. fades, etc.), due to exposure to light and other elements.

Using a "dry brush" technique to "feather" the edges gives a more gradual transition that is harder to detect.