Painterly pursuits
Over the Easter long weekend, Dave and I painted our bedroom. Previously it had been a bland beige, now it is a lovely medium blue. We used an eco-friendly paint and picked up a handy tool for reducing the water you need to clean up afterwards.
Paints are usually full of VOCs - Volatile Organic Compounds. These are chemicals used in many home furnishing products, and as they are released into the atmosphere they can make you sick, and contribute to air pollution. It’s generally a good idea to avoid or minimise them. Treehugger has a good summary about VOCs in paints.
The last time we painted, we went to Painted Earth in Fremantle to try some Porter’s Paints, because we’d seen them at the Sustainable Home show last year. We were really happy with the Porter’s, which have a great range of colours, low-VOC and no-VOC options, and seem committed to a low-impact business model. There was no paint odor and it was a quality product.
However, we didn’t have time for a long drive to Fremantle just for paint this weekend. We went to Bunnings and found several low-VOC paint options. We went with British Paints, because they had the colour we wanted. Many of the low-VOC paints we saw were marketed based on their low odour rather than their eco-friendliness. This seems fair enough to me, as I imagine there are more people annoyed by the smell of paint than by damage to the planet - as long as they end up with the eco-friendly paint I don’t care why they choose it! And hopefully they’ll come to expect low-VOCs as a standard feature for paint, demanding it in the future. As far as I can tell, the British Paints brand isn’t as low on the VOCs as the Porter’s version: there has been a bit of a paint smell, although it’s much less than you’d get with normal paints.
We also bought a tool for cleaning roller-brushes, based on it’s claim that using it would reduce the amount of water you use for cleaning from about 20L to about 6L. The Rota Cota Roller Cleaner is a scraper attached to a tube. First we used the scraper to remove most of the paint, saving it for re-use later. Then we stuck the roller in the tube, attached our hose to one end, and used a small amount of water forced through the tube to rinse the brush. I found things went faster (and therefore used less water) if if I did the scrape-and-rinse twice instead of persisting with the rinsing until the water became clear. I’m not sure we quite reached that 6L target on the weekend, but I’m pretty sure we used to use way more than 20L to clean up using our old method, so that’s an improvement.
All in all, it was a productive weekend: we’ve finished a project we’d been putting off for some time, and managed to make the more eco-friendly choices while we did it.