Painting Tips, Tricks and Hacks

Painting Tips, Tricks & Hacks page. #PaintingHacks

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This Painting Tips, Tricks and Hacks page contains a growing number of money saving tips for painting in and around your house!


Tips on this page include: DIY Paint Recycling Hack, Buying Paint from Oops Mountain,   Quick Paint Tray Clean Up,   DIY Frugal Headboard Makeover 

DIY Paint Recycling Hack

We had 7 old cans of water-based, acrylic paint in our garage and an ugly shelf unit made out of scrap wood that needed to be painted. Watch the magic painting tips happen as Steve mixes lavender, blue, dayglo red, brown and green paints together (we tried to keep it short).

Can you mix leftover paints together?And other painting tips!

Note: Please be careful – mix only water-based, acrylic paints with other water-based paints. And mix oil-based, alkyd paints with other oil-based paints . . . oil and water based paints shouldn’t be mixed together.

Remember that you can buy returned paint from Home Depot’s “Oops Mountain” at a steep discount. And if you do buy anything from Home Depot through your SwagBucks account you’ll receive a percentage of your purchase back as SwagBucks rewards—Learn more here.
Steve – Scottsdale, AZ

Watch as Steve mixes all of our left-over latex paint into one 5 gallon bucket. The paint from this video has been used on several projects around our house.

Several empty but colorful paint cans nested inside each other


Painting Tips from “Oops” Mountain

If you know you have a painting job coming up, start scouting out the “oops” shelf at Home Depot. This is where unused, returned paint is sold at a steep discount. The paint is usually returned because the tint didn’t work for the person who purchased it. You can often find a suitable color for just $5 per gallon!!! Many times matching quart cans of trim paint can be had for only $3.   Laura Woike – St. Peters, MO


Quick Paint Tray Clean-Up

When painting, put a supermarket plastic bag over the paint tray, then pour in the paint. When you’re finished painting you can pour any unused paint back into the can then pull off the plastic bag so that it turns inside out. I’ve used this painting tips method for years and it really shortens cleanup time considerably.   Tony Meola – Mauldin, SC


DIY Frugal Headboard Makeover 

A friend tipped us off to a beautiful trash picked headboard sitting along side of the road. We picked it up – it was made of maple wood. Our goal was to use materials we already had in the house to refinish it. We sanded and repainted it with some nice, left-over acrylic paint and a good brush.

The brush left really noticeable brush strokes. See how we used painting tips to fix the streaky paint problem and create an heirloom headboard for our guest room.

Steve didn’t like the paint brush streaks so he pulled out a 40 year old Paache airbrush and our pancake compressor. He diluted the paint 1 part water to 2 parts paint.

Our Porter Cable Pancake Compressor is nice and small, easy to move and incredibly powerful. Steve has used it for craft projects and construction projects. It’s really versatile and only costs around $100

An old headboard with the words "love is all you need" painted on it.Here’s a picture of the other side of the headboard before we painted it. It was cute, but didn’t fit with our decor.

For more great DIY Projects, visit our Pinterest page. We’d love to have you follow us!

For other money-saving ideas, visit our Money Saving Tips page.

If you have a painting tip or quick fix to share, please leave it in the comments below and we’ll review it for posting on this page.

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