Paint Tips for Lazy Girls
You may already know that when you're done painting for the day, you can drop your paint-covered roller or brush into a zip-style plastic bag, pop it in the fridge, and then use it again the next day. I do that with paints and varnishes all the time -- it saves me from putting paint down the drain until I absolutely have to.
Well, this weekend my laziness taught me two more benefits about this trick. First, if you leave a lot of paint on your brush when you stow it in the fridge, that can really come in handy. I expected to have to do two coats of basecoat paint, but I didn't need to in the end. However, while I didn't need to paint the whole wall, the next day I did need to touch up a few spots where the roller had skipped. (Yeah, I didn't skip - the roller did!) So, I pulled the brush out of the zip-bag, brushed the spot using what was already on the paintbrush (which was, uh, generous) and when it dried, it blended in perfectly. Fabulous! This saved me opening a paint can, stirring the paint again, and having much more to clean up.
Putting the paintbrush in the bag with paint still on it was pretty lazy, but I was even lazier than that. You see, when I reached under the sink to get a zip-bag for the roller, I ended up pulling out a huge two-gallon bag that was leftover from a previous use. I looked at the bag, then looked at the roller handle, then put the whole thing inside the bag and popped it into the fridge. That's right, I didn't even take the roller cover off the rolling apparatus! SHOCKING, I know. All I can say is that middle of the night painting skews my value system.
However, that led me to discovery #2. I didn't need to use that roller again with the basecoat, as it turned out, but I did need the roller handle for the Candlelight topcoat. So, I pulled off the roller cover while it was still inside the zip bag (saving lots of mess) and then put the roller apparatus under the faucet to wash it. This was a well-used roller handle, with lots of old metallic paint stubbornly stuck all over it. Once it was under the faucet, though, all of this old paint immediately peeled away. Of course! The plastic and metal were cold from the fridge and contracted away from the paint. Well, that was easy.
I'm starting to think that 75% of household hints came from someone thinking, "Oh, what the heck, I'm just going to do ______." And here I thought everyone was thinkin' ahead all scientific-like. Clearly, laziness contains far more opportunities than I had previous suspected. This calls for more research; I'm going to get right on it.
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