We love our home’s beautiful finishes, but here’s what nobody tells you about living with them

Committed home renovators David and Andrew Harrison-Colley (better known on Instagram as The Home Boys) are part of Ideal Home's new Open House contributors, sharing their thoughts on making a home together and living through the tricky parts. See the rest of their articles here.

There’s a particular smear along the staircase wall at roughly nephew-height that gets there every visit. Sticky hands, used like a handrail, wiped along the plaster as small feet negotiate the stairs. It used to worry us. Now it doesn’t, because a damp cloth and thirty seconds sorts it, and the wall looks exactly as it did before. That’s not an accident. It’s the paint.

It’s easy to fall for a finish at the sample stage – a tile square propped against the wall, a paint swatch held up in whatever light’s coming through the window that afternoon. What’s harder to picture in that moment is what the finish will actually ask of you once it’s living in your house full-time.

Some of ours have turned out to be genuinely low-effort. Others have simply traded one kind of upkeep for another. A year or so into some of our biggest calls, and a few months into others, here’s the honest version.

Terracotta: light day-to-day, with its own rules

We’ve told the full story of laying our terracotta floor earlier in this column – the knee pads, the linseed oil, the grouting saga – so we won’t repeat it here. What’s worth adding now is what it’s asked of us since. Day to day, it’s been genuinely easy: a regular vacuum, an occasional mop with a Wax Wash solution made specifically for the finish. That’s the whole routine.

But it does come with restrictions we didn’t fully clock at the time. We can’t reach for an ordinary floor cleaner, because anything not designed for a wax-finished tile risks stripping it. And we’re conscious of it as we look at robot vacuums – any wet-mopping function would be a hard no on this floor, so it’s shaping what we buy before we’ve even bought it.

We also expect the beeswax finish to need refreshing every couple of years, though we haven’t hit that point yet. Low daily maintenance, in other words, isn’t the same as no maintenance – it’s just maintenance on the floor’s terms rather than ours.

The island paint: matt, until small hands find the edges

The whole kitchen island – doors and drawer fronts included - was painted in a Valspar furniture paint, colour-matched to Dulux Heritage Brushed Gold, chosen for its flat matt finish and the fact it comes with primer and top coat already built in.

A year on, the finish itself has held up exactly as promised. What hasn’t entirely escaped is wear at the edges: a little scuffing around the integrated fridge and freezer door covers and, unsurprisingly, right where the fridge handle gets used several times a day.

The fix has been genuinely simple – a light sand back and a touch-up with paint we’d kept from the original tin – but it’s not nothing. It’s a maintenance task with a season attached, the kind of small job that turns up once the paint’s had enough hands on it, rather than a one-and-done finish. Worth knowing before you commit a matt furniture paint to the busiest door in the kitchen.

GoodHome durable emulsion: the wipe-down test we didn’t plan for

We used B&Q’s GoodHome durable emulsion on walls throughout the cottage, kitchen and bathrooms included, mostly for the finish and the coverage. What we didn’t plan for was the staircase becoming its own unofficial trial.

Nieces and nephews treat that wall like a handrail, sticky hands and all, and a durable, wipeable emulsion turns that into a quick job with a damp cloth rather than a repaint. It wasn’t why we chose it. It’s turned into the best argument for it.

Milano Elizabeth fittings: choosing consistency over evolution

We genuinely love the look of unlacquered brass – the way it darkens and marks and develops a patina that feels earned rather than faked. If we lived somewhere with soft water and an unlimited budget, we might well have gone there. But we’re in Suffolk, which means hard water, which means limescale is a real and constant threat to any brass finish near a tap or shower.

Unlacquered brass in a hard water area can mark unevenly rather than age gracefully, and keeping on top of that felt like more commitment than we wanted. Brushed brass on the Milano Elizabeth fittings also came in kinder on the budget.

So the decision was less about taste and more about being honest with ourselves: the patina we love in photos isn’t necessarily the patina we’d love dealing with every day, in our water, on our budget. A year on, ours have asked very little of us beyond gentle wiping, and still look close to new.

What “small print” actually means

The more finishes we live with, the more we realise maintenance isn’t one thing. Sometimes it’s a specialist product you now have to keep in the cupboard. Sometimes it’s a restriction – a cleaner you can’t use, a robot vacuum feature you’ll have to switch off. Sometimes it’s a light sand and a touch-up you didn’t know was coming. And sometimes, as with the brass, it’s admitting that the finish you love aesthetically isn’t always the one that suits your budget, your water or your patience.

The other thing worth separating out is the difference between what a finish needs every week and what it needs every year or two. Wiping a wall is nothing. Resealing a floor, or touching up a well-used door edge, is a smaller but real commitment – and it’s worth knowing which one you’re signing up for before the sample leaves the shop.

Choosing with our eyes open

We still love the moment when the samples come out and a room starts to take shape. We’ve just learned to turn them over and read the care instructions too.

The best finish isn’t necessarily the one that asks the least of you – it’s the one whose small print you’re genuinely happy to live with.