Painting and Decorating.

This week is painting and decorating kit. Right, you know the drill by now. Ferret round and bring out all the kit that you use when decorating – paints, brushes, rollers, sanding paper, filler, white spirit etc – anything that you need to get hold of when you are decorating a room. Then divide it into categories and go through it. Be pretty ruthless with this category, don’t hang on to old paint for too long – it can go “off” quite badly (as I found out when I was painting the cabinet in my utility recently!). Usually old paint needs to be recycled in a special area at the tip, so make sure that you know your tip’s rules.

Old paint brushes – do make sure that you only keep the best ones. Again, as I found out when painting my utility, you want to make sure that your brushes are up to the job – I was cursing at the quality of the paint I was using when I came to realise it was actually the fault of the old brush. Once I picked out a better brush, the paint went on much better. So let those old brushes go, there is often only a certain number of times you can use them.

Once you have let go of the items that you do not wish to keep, make sure that you store the rest of the items together. I like to create modules for storage in the garage. I have see-through Really Useful boxes to keep things together and I have one that has all my decorating kit in it.