Everyone is always saying that the most affordable renovation you can do to your home is paint the rooms inside. While it is true that paint can make a big impact for a relatively small amount, there is still a cost to it. With supplies, the gallons of paint and primer, and your precious time (which does have a value), it’s not a free venture. Well, I have a tip that will save you money if you are a DIY painter like myself.
Recently we decided to paint our kitchen. It was this dark yellow color and in need of some freshening up and brightening up. Now, I do a lot of paint projects and have just about every color under the sun of half full paint cans. Does this sound familiar to any of you? I bet there are a few basement rooms stuffed to the brim with these useless leftover paint cans out there. Or, maybe you got way too many of those little sample paints and only used a tiny bit of each to put a swatch of it on your wall before deciding which color to go with. Of course it’s nice to save some of those paints for touch-up, but if you are a penny-pincher like me, you see a lot of wasted money in those half empty cans.
It just so happened that the only brand of paint I’ll ever use (Dutch Boy Platinum) was having a great discount recently. With most items that go on sale, you take advantage by stocking up, but you can’t really do that with paint because; how will you know what color you’ll need or want in the future. Ah, but you can stock up on this wonderful item, by buying white.
Here’s the tip: Buy white paint when it’s on sale and mix it with your leftover colors.
My leftovers have a lot of deep colors from the time before I discovered the power of accessories to bring life and color to a room. This works in my favor now as a tiny bit of these bright colors mixed with white give me a pleasing and paler version, which is much more suitable for the walls, in my opinion.
There are a few tips I want to give you about mixing paint:
1. Keep the finishes of the paints in mind. You wouldn’t want to try to mix high gloss with eggshell.
2. Try it in small batches first
3. As you are mixing the small trials pay attention to the amount of each element you are putting in. For instance: if you mix two spoonfuls of white to one spoonful of yellow, that means you are mixing a 2:1 ratio. This takes the guess-work of trying to achieve that first perfect combo you discovered.
4.Use old Folgers cans to mix the paint in: they are wonderful because they have lids and hand holds.
5. Keep a sample. If you happen to run out or need to do touch up in the future, you don’t want to have to go through the process of trying to match exactly what you have (that would be really hard). Instead, paint a little piece of card stock or wood with the same color and stores like Menards will match it for you.
6. Never throw away leftover paint. Who knows, you could recycle it for another project someday.
I hope this has been helpful to you.
Meanwhile….behind me here’s what Jordan was up to.
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