Painting the walls of the interior of your home is a tricky enough matter as is, but when you know that there will be young children that are in the equation or there will be some in your future, everything changes just a bit.
Children and walls go together like… well, a bull in a shop full of all kinds of tea, teapots, and other breakables.
When you are painting, knowing that you have children at home means that you should likely have a certain strategy in mind for how you will paint the walls.
When it comes to choosing colors for the interior walls of your home, you should be careful to chose colors that are appropriate for the possibility that the kids aren’t going to rein it in, mess and ‘art’ wise, so to speak.
It is somewhat important, therefore, that you choose colors that are going to conceal any kinds of messes that may be made whether just smudges from things like jam sandwiches or finger paint.
White as a color for your halls is basically the equivalent of hanging a canvas on the wall and hanging a sign that says “paint here” above it — it is better to go with colors that are darker, like dark beige or grey.
Sometimes the best way to avoid having your kids draw on the wall is to provide a wall for them where it is perfectly okay for them to draw or sketch or even practice learning letters of the alphabet.
This can come in the form of a chalkboard or even a dry erase wall — just remember to keep chalk and dry erase markers in stock so they always have something with which they can make their dreams come alive on your one designated wall.
Not all paint is the same when it comes to keeping the newly painted walls of your home looking good.
A higher quality paint is often much easier to clean than a lower quality paint, so to speak, and will require much less maintenance, even in the face of children having a go at it with spilled spaghetti and the occasional failure to wash hands after going outside and playing in the mud.
There are many finishes and not all of them are quite the same when it comes to keeping your walls clean.
The matte finish, for example, is extremely difficult to keep clean — you would not want to have your high traffic halls painted with matte paint because it will be more difficult to clean.
The higher the gloss on your paint, the more easy it will be for you to clean — things that would be difficult to clean might just wipe off clean easily when you have a satin or a semi-gloss paint.
There are two options that you have when it comes to protecting your outlets, and both of them are quite good in terms of making sure you keep your children safer.
One of them is to use the kind of plastic pronged cover that will prevent children from putting anything into the outlets — though these aren’t foolproof and some children can manage to remove these.
The other option is more costly but more difficult for children to circumnavigate — the entire outlet is replaced with a specific kind of outlet that cannot have anything put in other than proper plugs.