Eco Friendly Painting Tips to Keep Your Home Beautiful

It’s no secret that a fresh coat of paint can keep your home, both inside and out, looking beautiful. But for those who want to protect the environment just as much as they want to protect the beauty of their home, it can be a difficult struggle between what you want to do, what you think is best to do, and preventing your home from looking run down or aged. There are lots of ways to reduce your impact on the environment while still keeping your home modern and functional. Here are just a few tips that are both eco friendly and aesthetics friendly:

1. Use a low VOC paint. There are lots of different brands that offer low VOC paints. These are the brand that you want to be buying from if you are going to both protect the environment and keep your home beautiful. VOCs are volatile organic compounds which out gas from paints for days or weeks after you put the paint up. These compounds can hurt the environment but they actually do the most damage to your immediate indoor air quality. Even if you are no longer smelling wet paint, you might still be inhaling VOCs. Low-VOC paint protects your air quality and the environment.

2. Buy less paint. One of the biggest mistakes people make when buying paint for their homes is that they buy too much paint. The paint on the market today is designed to cover your walls much better and much faster than paint did even ten years ago. If you want to be more eco friendly when also painting the interior or exterior of your home, start by buying less paint. Don’t buy more pain that you need, as it will probably sit around in your garage until it just goes bad.

3. Use up whatever paint you have leftover. There are lots of things you can do with empty paint buckets, but what do you do with paint that you did not use? You are probably going to have at least a little bit of paint left over when you are done with your projects. There are two things that you can do: dispose of it, or find a way to use it up. You will probably want to store a little bit of it for touchups, and once you are totally done with that paint, you can donate it to a project like habitat for humanity or even to a local theater group so they can use it to create sets.

4. Dispose of paint the right way. If you have leftover or old paint that you need to get rid of, do not throw it away and do not pour it down the sink. If there is no way to use it up or the paint has gone bad and would not be useful to anyone else, take it to a facility that is specifically designed to deal with paint. They can dispose of it safely so that it does not contaminate the environment.

5. Use ground covers. While painting your Sarasota home, either the interior or the exterior, make sure that you use ground covers. This may be obvious when you are painting the interior of your home, but less obvious when painting the exterior. Even minors spills could contaminate the environment. If you want to prevent any of your paint from damaging the environment, you can use a ground cloth to make sure it does not spill or drip onto your grass, rocks, plants, or other landscaping.

6. Reuse your paint thinner. Paint thinner is too often disposed of after it is just used once to clean brushes or clean up a drip. Most people do not realize that the same paint thinner can be used over and over. Overtime, it will start to develop a sludge at the bottom of the container. When it is no longer effectively cleaning off your brushes, that is when you want to throw it away.

7. Make sure your store any extra paint the right way. If you have extra paint and you want to hold on to it for a while to touch up regions you might have missed, make sure you are storing it properly. This needs to be in a dry place, where it will not freeze. Make sure your hammer the lid back into place—this will prevent it from spilling if it is knocked over and will also allow you to store the can upside down, which will prevent air from leaking into the paint can and drying out the paint inside.