A couple weeks ago I went through a run down of how to choose and environmentally friendly paint. Now I want to share a bit about what decision we made and how it is working out so far.
For some reason, the small town we bought our house in has about 50 different privately owned auto shop, but the only hardware store in town is a giant Menards. And this Menards carries 2 brands of paint – Dutch Boy and Pittsburgh Paint.
Pittsburgh Paint makes a Low-VOC paint line called “Grand Distinction”. And while the info online says it “contains considerably less VOCs than other leading paints with similar attributes,” they do not seem to actually publish the VOC levels on their website. It probably does say on the can, but *spoiler alert* this was not the paint I chose, so I don’t have the can around to check the levels.
Dutch Boy’s Low-VOC paint line is called “Refresh” and is Greenguard certified as being low in VOCs and low in other air polutents. The base paint contains 50 ppg VOCs. Refresh also claims to reduce household odors with “Arm and Hammer® technology”. But I’m honestly pretty skeptical about that. We’ll see.
So far we’ve painted our living room and our front room with the Refresh paint, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it. There is very little odor while painting, and the little odor there is fades away very quickly – and I’ve been painting in the winter, so it’s not like I’ve got the windows open to help clear out any odors.
I’ve also been pleased with the coverage thus far. Now we’ve only gone from cream walls to white, but the ceilings took two coats of paint, and for the most part the walls only required one! We’ve got some color plans coming up, as well as painting our wooden cabinets, so I’ll report back on the coverage when I’ve seen how those projects pan out.