Transforming the Living Room & Dining Room with Olympic Paint—Renovation Redecoration

In our quest to find the best no-VOC paint, Tazim and I have tried nearly every brand on the market.

Our first experiences could be cautionary tales that eco-friendly products aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be—but we were pleasantly surprised by Olympics Premium line, which offers no-VOC options at a value for quality price point.

Olympic is one of the only paint manufacturers to put their low/zero VOC-paint out there as their premium interior product—instead of selecting the green choice as an alternative, it’s the default if you select their premium line. Consumers might even over-look the Green Seal certification on the label if they weren’t looking for it, but we like to imagine that they’d be pleasantly surprised when they popped the can at home, and weren’t bombarded by a noxious aroma.

We selected Olympic for the large, expansive living areas in our Mother’s house. We were looking for a product that would fit into our budget, and that we felt would offer good coverage without foul odour. Because family members have respritory sensitivity, it was important to us to make sure that we chose a low VOC paint not just for ecological reasons, but with health in mind.

Because we were painting a pale yellow over a dusty-navy, we also selected Olympic’s Premium Zero VOC primer for our undercoat. Thick and creamy but with great coverage, we expect that it will become or go-to primer product for all our future projects (where we don’t need to transition from oil to acrylic, as it is just a latex product), It’s hard to describe just how pleased we were with this, primer often seems like chalky milk made from powder—by contrast this was thick and delicious coconut cream. It rolled and brushed on well, and after a single coat we were confident we could start with our top colour.

The top-coat Premium interior latex was also a dream to work with. exhibiting the same great creaminess and total coverage, with a colour consistent pigment that matched the swatch we’d selected. Because the paint is low VOC, we found that we had to let it rest a while between coats. This was of course to be expected. Though the base is Zero-VOC, the pigmentation does carry some VOCs into the product—that being said, we couldn’t smell a  thing while we were working with the paint. Only a mild and rather pleasant chalky tempura paint odour crossed our nostrils. The paint was also less forgiving of surface imperfections, and didn’t fill in things like thumb-tack holes that you know you should patch, but that usually plug up with a lick of paint. This isn’t a big deal, but it’s something we’ll keep in mind  next time.

The end result: the final finish looks fantastic, and has proven to be hard-wearing. A month in and a few scrapes and bangs later, most marking comes out with buffing, and the delicate eggshell finish seems invincible.

Premium Interior Latex: Coverage 400 square feet/3.78L gallon