You can claim for maintenance of what you already have but you cannot claim for changes or upgrades. The reason is you own the property so if you upgrade floors from carpet to hardward, your asset increased in price too. You can't have the asset value increase and also claim the costs.

So yes, you can claim the paint because you are maintaining what you had but no you cannot claim the upgraded floors. Had you put in new carpet, which is replacing not upgrading, you could have claimed the cost of that.

Another example would be if you had a gravel driveway. You could claim the cost of dumping a new load of gravel on top but if you pave the drive, that's an upgrade and you cannot claim that. However, going forward, if you pay to have the paved driveway sealed in a couple years time, that's maintaining the driveway and the sealing would be claimable.