Most of the rooms in the house have Benjamin artwork on at least one wall, in everything from pencil to permanent marker. We have learned that the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser will remove most of it, but it takes a layer of paint with it. There are also several places where the walls get touched regularly and have built up a film of dirt and skin oils.

We’ve never been happy with the plain off-white walls that the homebuilder made for us. Our experience with cleaning them has convinced us that relatively cheap paint was used, too. This prompted us to create a grand house painting plan, where we would use a paint that can be easily cleaned of artwork and stains. We chose Duration paint from Sherwin-Williams. Kathy saw a cleaning demonstration at the store and was very impressed.

A few weeks ago, late in October, we painted our bedroom walls with Duration paint, in the color named “Optimistic Yellow.” The trim is mostly painted, but we haven’t finished the doors. Those are painted bright white, in high gloss. Bright white is our plan for all the interior trim and doors in the house, which currently are the same boring off-white as the rest of the house.

We’ve picked a color named “Honest Blue” for our front room, but as of now it’s still not painted. The rest of the house will eventually get paint too, after we pick colors.

You can look up these colors by name if you visit this website, click on the Color Visualizer, then click on “Find Color.”

Feel free to offer suggestions for colors in the rest of the house! In the end we’ll go with what we like, but I wouldn’t mind being introduced to colors I might not have considered.