Painting

After two trips to Watsonville and much wringing of hands, escrow closed. I got the key. And now I’m covered in paint.

My move-in date is a couple of weeks from now. (I didn’t end the lease on my apartment until I was sure escrow was closed.) Until then, I’ll be painting the walls and having someone refinish the floors, all of which are best done before there’s a lot of furniture in the house.

To prepare, I read a few articles about environmentally friendly paint. My highest priority was finding a paint with no volatile organic compounds, the stuff that makes new paint smell like new paint. I don’t want that stuff offgassing into my house for months and years to come, filling my lungs and, worse, filling the much smaller lungs of my two cats.

But wow! There are some hippie paints out there. Here are some things I’ve noticed while shopping for environmentally friendly paints:

• There’s a brand that bills itself as the old-fashioned, all-natural paints the pioneers used, and its major selling point is that it contains milk and milk proteins. That’s just weird. The pioneers used asbestos, too, but I’m not jumping up to coat my walls with that, either.
•  For the prices on these paints, the can should perform a “Be Our Guest” style song and dance while it paints itself on the wall.
•  I’ve used Yolo Colorhouse in the past, and their paints are beautiful, but I just feel weird with their hippie names and colors, all named after natural phenomena like grain. Can’t I want to help the environment but also want to paint a wall candy apple red? And can’t I enjoy silly names like “Candy Apple Red?”

Conclusion: I’m using Behr Premium Plus. Behr is the Home Depot in-house brand, and the Premium Plus version has no volatile organic compounds. It’s half or a quarter the cost of the hippier brands and comes in every single color Home Depot can design. And it’s quite convenient: I went to Home Depot three times last weekend. It’s apparently some sort of requirement of being a new homeowner.