time to paint

Last weekend while visting several hardware stores (because that's what you do when you are about to buy a house that needs lots of work...) we checked out paint colours for the house. We know we want to paint the ceilings first with a semi-glossy white to highlight the gorgeous exposed beams that are currently green, but are still deciding on the rest of the house.

The walls will need some work before we paint (ie removing that lovely wallpaper etc) but after some research on paints we decided that we really want to use something that is zero VOC and environmentally friendly too. We have looked at a couple of brands and for about $4 more per gallon you can buy paint that doesn't make you and the planet sick. Which sounds like a great idea to me especially since the 3 of us Bryce, Coop and I all have allergies...

There are a few companies out there and so we have options.

Yolo Paints, a company from Oregon (scores points from Bryce) make zero VOC paints, and their colours, though limited, are nice earthy tones and look like something we'd like - we couldn't take samples to see them in the house though unless we paid money, which I think is the main reason they were not selling in the store we visited.

Olympic Paints was the next one we found at Lowes, and the unhelpful guy in the paint section said it was good, but the darker colours were harder to cover (which is pretty usual anyway I think)

Then I came across this great article in Dwell about just this topic and they had done the ground work for us and compared 3 different brands of paint Yolo, AFM Safecoat and Benjamin Moore Natura. Natura won as it emits the least amount of VOC's and still has great coverage and range of colours. Now we just have to choose the colour we want :)