It's amazing the places you can pick up DIY tips from. If you pay attention, you can learn all sorts of tricks and hacks from seemingly unrelated places.
Take for instance, middle-school art class. We had the fortune of being instructed by an art preservationist who specialized in restoration and also worked at our local art museum cleaning the paintings.
After watching a bunch of barely-teenagers try to brutally clean their art supplies, aghast, she immediately set aside the rest of the week to teach us proper brush cleaning techniques for each style of brush and type of paint.
Sure, you can pick up some low-VOC, environmentally friendly paint. But have you ever thought about your painting tools and supplies? Those brushes, rollers, tarps and cleaning solutions can add to some real mess for the planet if you aren't careful.
On a hunt for some quality, eco-friendly painting tools, we came across these must-have products for a truly green painting project.
1)Envirobrush Pro - A paint brush that claims to cut down waste by 50%. If it's next to impossible to clean your paint brush (or if you don't have a spare ten seconds), simply detach the bristles and reattach a new "bristle pack." Much less waste and a fresh, new brush for the next painting project you'll tackle.
For living in an ancient house with plaster walls, I have an unnatural desire to wallpaper my very uneven vertical spaces. I've looked at different ways to make wallpaper happen, yet another solution that keeps popping up through my endless perusal of the design blogosphere is using paint to "make" wallpaper. While this technique is stunning when executed well, the amount of planning, measuring, taping, and the huge margin of error make me nervous, especially since I usually don't have endless extra hours to accomplish such a feat. However, I think I've stumbled upon a solution that happily marries the look of wallpaper with the ease of painting.
One of the revelations from last year's Hardware Show was the Green Toad Pivoting Paint Brush System.
Designed with the consultation of physical therapists, the 'Green Toad' system
uses a 360-degree, rotating head system that locks in eight different positions. It
allows anyone to paint at an angle that's most comfortable for them, which reduces the pain and discomfort associated with traditional paint brushes.
