It’s spray paint this time, though. Spray paint and I go way back….I was spray painting stuff long before I got on my latest furniture refinishing kick. A number of years ago when we lived in our townhouse, I changed all the doorknobs to a brushed nickel finish. It looked great, but the hinges were all still brass. At that point, cheap brushed nickel hinges were not available…all Home Depot carried were ones that cost $10 apiece. At that rate, replacing our hinges would have cost well over $100. I don’t know what made me think of it then, but I went out and bought some spray paint that looked like brushed nickel and just painted all the old hinges. And voila! We had lovely new-looking hinges for a total layout of three dollars.
Since then I’ve spray painted numerous objects(I’ll post pictures of them here and there, hopefully), and rescued a lot of items that would have gotten thrown away otherwise. My most recent painting project was a vent cover. All the covers that were here when we moved in were a sort of ugly, flat brown color. We replaced the ones that weren’t even functional anymore, and I’ve painted the ones that still worked. I used either silver or white paint, depending on the room.
Here’s a brown one:
A little spray paint, and it’s no longer brown!
Doing this outside results in some very unsual-looking vegetation. :p
While I don’t know that spray paint is a particularly green item(maybe there’s an eco-friendly type out there…I don’t know!), I do know that one can of paint can revitalize a surprisingly large amount of stuff that would be garbage otherwise. So, I’m willing to hazard a guess that the overall trash-reducing effect of a can probably offset the small bit of pollution it produces, especially if you consider that by reusing already existing items, you reduce the demand for new items(which create pollution and use resources).
Filed under: Green and Frugal, Painting | 2 Comments
Tags: reusing
We spray paint everything also! We have done the vent covers, hinges, door handles, screw heads…the list goes on! Since I am in the book business, I have alot of great boxes laying around and we cut those open or use the inside as our excess paint receiver.
Oooh, a fellow spray-paint fan!
Fortunately, our backyard has been nothing but weeds up to this point, and so it’s no big deal if I paint on them. We’re getting ready to seed it, but I still have our whole side yard which is shady and weedy. I’ll keep the cardboard idea in mind if we ever manage to get a nice lawn going on our whole property! lol