Organizing Paint Chaos

Way back when, Hubby did a little update to our “garage”. We don’t have a garage… one kid later, we realize how much of an oversight this was when purchasing our condo, but we throw that in the Live-&-Learn bucket of purchasing our first home and try to make the best of what we’ve got.

Two years after that little project, it’s still working for us, but it was getting a little crowded.
Yes, those are crutches wedged on the left side of the washer from my knee surgery 4 years ago… I thought those went to Goodwill. Guess not. And we never know where to put our Christmas tree stand, so it just kind of lives on the dryer.
Here’s a close up:

We have now painted every room in our house and I thought it was time to pair down the large gallon cans to smaller quart ones. I picked up the paint for my living room this weekend since it was $5 off a gallon at Home Depot. WOOT! I also picked up paint for the kitchen & our master bathroom. I’m crazy. What…? $5 off is a good deal, especially when I splurged and got the Behr paint+primer in one. It goes on like buttah. Love it.

So for $2.97 each, I picked up these cute little empty quart cans and started going through our old paint.

The color on the left is the blue in our kitchen. Even though I’m going to paint the kitchen again, I figured the blue might be good for another project down the line. Something small since there’s only about 1/2 quart of paint left. The can on the right is from our master bedroom. I still absolutely love this color and have no plans to repaint this room while we live here. It’s so rich and chocolatey. Probably one of my best paint color pickin’s ever. And those two cans were the only ones I was able to pair down. What?! Yes, while going through my paint cans, I realized that I am a paint-over-purchaser. I have at least a half gallon of paint or more left from every other room in our house. But doing this meant I opened each can, stirred it really well since some of the pigments had separated, and I cleaned off the rim really well to get a really good seal on the can. I also did this:

I also labeled the top of each can this way, but now I can see exactly what we’ve got at a quick glance, or a quick move of one can to see what’s behind it. I couldn’t believe that I’ve got a whole gallon, or a few brush strokes shy of a gallon, of paint for some of these rooms! I love these colors, and even the ones I’m over, they would be great for a smaller project and maybe mixed with some grey or white to change the lightness or tone of it. That khaki in the front is a great khaki, but when you paint a tiny bathroom that color that gets zero natural light, it gets muddy & gross.

Here’s the refreshed top shelf:

I also realized I’ve accumulated a lot of spray paints, and a wine rack would be a great way to store them so you can see the color of the caps. Or maybe just a crate flipped on it’s side so you can lay the cans down to see the caps. I know what I’m going to be looking for on my next Goodwill trip!
Admittedly, it’s not a major live changing improvement, but it’s a small one. I might even get really OCD & make a little hanging list of the spray paints I have and their colors to hang from the little lip on the shelf, and do the same for the gallon cans. I have now accumulated lots of tester pots of paint from various projects like Will’s Toy Story cut-outs and my current living room wall situation:
Which reminds me… I need to start taping that room off so we can paint it this weekend. Woot! An end to the paint swatch mosaic madness!

Have you caught the organizing bug? What about the home improvement one? I swear it’s contagious. My favorite part of organizing or re-organizing something is learning something new and ridiculous about myself. Keep your eyes peeled for me on an episode of Hoarders: Buried Alive by paint. I’ll be sitting on my paint can thrown drinking my Arnold Palmer out of an empty paint can…