From a clear coat for wood to painting a porch or painting your bathroom, there are many considerations that you must make when painting just about any part of your home. Some of these considerations might be relatively obvious, while others actually come as a surprise. At the end of the day, however, making the right decision for your home and your family is, of course, what will matter the very most.

For instance, you’ll need to consider a color. If you haven’t painted your walls in quite some time, it’s likely that you’ll be interested in a more updated and trendy color than what you currently have. In many cases, beige and other such neutral tones will be used, as these are among the most popular choices among those choosing to paint part of their home, if not all of it. If you’re planning on selling your home, such neutral tones can be ideal as well, allowing you to sell your home faster.

The same can also be said for blue bathrooms. Though this might be a bit surprising, the presence of a blue bathroom or even multiple blue bathrooms can raise the selling price of any given home quite considerably. In some cases, it even bumps up this price by as much as $5,400 in total, which is certainly a considerably amount of money, more than it would have ever taken to paint the bathroom blue in the first place.

But the safety of your paint is also something that will need to be taken into consideration – and not something that everyone is aware of. But in actuality, the presence of volatile organic compounds (which are also known as VOCs) in various types of paints can have a variety of ill effects, especially on the health of those that are particularly susceptible to chemical pollutants, such as the very young, the very old, and those who have weakened immune systems for whatever reason. And these volatile organic compounds can be found in just about every type of paint, from the typical clear coat for wood to paint used for priming walls to even the paint that we choose for our children’s rooms.

Avoiding such paint with volatile organic compounds, be it clear coat for wood or paint for staining concrete, can help us to avoid a wide variety of health concerns. After all, the data that has been gathered on the subject shows clearly that the children in the top one fourth of VOC exposure have more than a 100% chance of contracting asthma or having their currently existing asthma worsen. In addition to this, the chances of developing eczema rise by more than 100% as well – and the chances of developing rhinitis at some point in time, if not on a chronic basis, actually rise by as much as 300%, a truly astronomical amount by just about any standards.

But even though children are likely to be susceptible to the volatile organic compounds used in everything from clear coat for wood to wall primer to typical wall paint, adults can suffer the ill effects of such volatile organic compounds as well. This can be seen particularly clearly in a study that was done by the Syracuse Center of Excellence. In this study, participants from a typical office environment (where paint with VOC elements was used) spent about a week in an office environment that had been environmentally controlled. The results were quite staggering, to say the least.

These results showed that the overall cognitive ability of all of the employees that were tested actually rose by as much as 100% – even more than that, as a matter of fact. This clearly shows that working in an environment where volatile organic compounds are present, be they in the clear coat for wood or the regular wall paint, can be hugely detrimental. This is so much the case that they can even cause a decrease in overall cognitive function, something that can have quite profound effects on the lives of many when all is said and done here in the United States.