It’s hard to get good paint options, especially when you want low-VOC paint that truly is and not simply claiming to be. Up until now our only local paint stores have been Sherwin Williams, Lowes, and Home Depot.
As far as our living room goes…they haven’t served us well.
(you can review our two previous attempts at painting our living room here and here).
However, with the most perfect timing, a Benjamin Moore store was beamed down from heaven and opened up in our area within the past few weeks, so naturally we pounced!
We had decided to ditch gray paint altogether in our living room and go for white. I’d narrowed it down to choosing between BM’s Simply White and Chantilly Lace before going to the store. As fate would have it, Chantilly Lace happened to be on the walls in the store and it was also painted in a south-facing room, same as our living room – woot!
It looked like a true and warm white on the walls, with no yellow or blue undertones; at the very faintest it might be said it has a super-small tinge of grey undertones.
Having seen it on the store walls…and adding in the low risk of white turning out wrong…and at a point where we’re both too tired of painting the room to care anymore…I went straight ahead with buying a gallon in the Eggshell finish and lugged it home.
Of special note, I chose Benjamin Moore’s Natura line of paint. It’s a super-low VOC paint in which there are almost no VOCs in both the base paint and the colorant; a hard combo to find from most paint brands. It is a water-based acrylic paint that hardly compromises air quality and is friendly for asthma sufferers. In fact they claim there is almost no smell from the Natura paints.
Any kind of chemical smells easily overpower me in a way that I can’t be in the same room – most household cleaners fall under this, and so do paints. Our last paint in the living room, Valspar, had been so bad that I could smell the paint for days afterwards not only in the entire main level but also the second floor and I was keeping our windows cracked open in 30-degree weather. Not ideal.
Therefore I was very keen to try the Natura line and see how well their claims stacked up.
This was also our first time trying Benjamin Moore, so both of us were curious to compare the quality of it to Sherwin Williams and Valspar.
We were not disappointed.
The paint was a nice consistency – it wasn’t watery, didn’t splatter, and gave great coverage.
Even better was that it really didn’t give much of an odor. As in, I seriously had to go right up to the can to get even the faintest whiff of “paint” smell. I’m sold.
It also dries in approx 30 minutes – pretty fast, and a big help for knocking out painting a room in one afternoon.
Oh and look – we have a uniform color happening behind the radiator now!
We’re planning to do crown moulding, thus why we didn’t bother finishing off the tops of the walls. As for when we’ll actually get to install the moulding…
We’re really digging the white with the wood trim and are both happy with our final color choice. I can’t wait to get our living room furniture moved in from the dining room and start decorating!
Shared On: beforeandafterwednesday
