Wednesday 27 June 2007

A fresh coat of paint

With the weather here more like spring than summer we have decided to do a bit of spring cleaning and decorating. We moved into our house when it was new, sixteen years ago and at the time all the interior walls were painted pale yellow apart from white in the bathroom. Yellow seemed an odd choice to paint a whole house and as we have got round to decorating each room we happily painted over it. The boys have chosen their own paint colours but for every other room, we have chosen a different shade of white, milk white, stone, jasmine white, lily white. I think I have been influenced by cool Scandinavian style rooms I've seen in magazines, they always seem so calm.

Of course all the tins of left over white have collected in the garage and if we need to touch up a wall we have no idea which white was used in each room. Hence my recent decision to simplify the whole decorating process and use the same shade of white throughout the house. Hopefully this will save us time and money as well as being more eco-friendly as we should eliminate left over paint. After much research we have chosen Green Paints from The Green Shop near Stroud. They produce a very good catalogue (there are no standards for organic or natural paints so it was good to have so much detail on ingredients) and have a mail order service but its not too far for us so yesterday my husband and I had a day trip by ourselves while the boys were at school.

The choice we made when faced with one of the biggest selections of natural paints in the country in a huge range of colours...........soft white! I'm not giving up on this idea of a calm uncluttered house that easily!

After buying the paint we had time left to spoil ourselves for a couple of hours, so we drove down into Stroud and had coffee in an organic cafe before wandering around the town. I found a small shop selling wool and managed to find some sock wool made in the UK, in Bradford, a good start in my effort to buy UK fibres. We then had a picnic on Minchinhampton Common and stopped for a wander around Cricklade before heading home. The area is very pretty and compared to our part of the world, very hilly. A pleasant, pottering sort of day which our boys would have hated but we really enjoyed.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you know which brand of wool it was? I'd be most interested to find out!

I've heard alot about green paints, would you be so kind as to give us a description of how you find using them? I'd be really interested! :)

willow said...

Hi Tash,
I have not heard of this brand before. It is Woolcraft, the adress given is Clifford Street Mills, Bradford. I've tried to search for a bit more info but have not been able to find anything.
I haven't started the painting yet but hope to do some in a week or so and will report back.