Posting the paint tins entry last week made me wonder what about paint itself.

I know there are a lot of worthwhile causes out there that collect the half-cans of paint sat around in everyone’s cellar/shed/store-cupboard and put them to good uses – like painting murals, bit of furniture or when there is enough left, decorating interiors of community projects and the like.

These things tend to be local but does anyone know of any national schemes? If not, how about local ones in your area? If you do, leave the details in a comment – including which area it is if it’s a local one.

And aside from that, any crafty craft-y reuse ideas for old emulsion/gloss paint?

I was potting up the many, many children of my spider plant the other day and I needed more containers to use as plant pots. I went into the cellar and found a couple of old paint tins – gloss paint so actually tins rather than the standard plastic tub used for emulsion these days.

They were just the right size for my plants so have been commandeered for that this time but it made me wonder what else I could use them for – especially since they have (admittedly difficult to remove) airtight lids.

Any suggestions?

We feel the same about interior decoration as we do about cleaning: our desire for a clean and well-painted house is marginally outweighed by our desire not to actually clean or paint our house. We’re the type of people that live in half-decorated rooms for months and months on end (our personal best is the living room which took 18months to “finish” – finish in inverted commas because, another 18 months on, we still haven’t sorted out the flooring or painted the radiator yet).

Anyway, in a very unlike us moment, we decided to paint the kitchen last weekend. When we’re done, we washed the emulsion brushes out with water but hit a dilemma with the gloss brushes: is it better to wash them out turps (or some turps substitute as was the actual case) and then pour the resulting painty-turps down the drain or, since they were cheap brushes to start with, just throw them away?

Obviously, throwaway culture is bad – because so much effort went into making the brushes in the first place and then transporting them to us via a DIY emporium – but is pouring a whole bunch of chemicals down the drain any better?

I’m always inclined towards the throwaway option because even after endless time with a tub of turps, I find it so hard to get the brushes re-usable clean again that I end up throwing them away in the end anyway – but THROWAWAY CULTURE, BAAAAAAD! So you see my dilemma.

Since both of those seem pretty bad options, are there any alternatives that we should be considering instead?

(Photo by levi szekeres, c/o sxc.hu)