The Garage: Extra Paint Storage

We worked on some garage organization projects at the beginning of last year, including a DIY ceiling storage solution & a wall track system.  Both projects have helped tremendously, but we still had a lot of smaller areas to work on - including our paint storage & organization.

All in all, our initial setup wasn't too bad:

The problem was that the shelf was filling up pretty quickly & it was hard to see what we had on hand.  In most cases, we had gallon paint cans that were less than half full.

Another issue we had, was the dreaded rust that formed along the top of many of the rims, which always led to rust particles falling into the can every time we wanted to paint something (this was the worst one, but most of the other cans still had a good amount of rust):

I had originally seen Jen from IHeart Organizing tackle these problems by transferring her paint into glass jars.  Unfortunately, I never got around to doing it myself.  I was convinced that it was going to be tedious, messy, & just not worth it in the end.  However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we might really benefit from it.

I began by making a list of how much paint was left of each color, along with the paint brand, color, & sheen.

I used these conversions to figure out which size jars I would need:

  1/2 gallon = 64 ounces

1 quart = 32 ounces

1/2 quart = 16 ounces

Next, I headed to Hobby Lobby while the glass was 50% off to pick up some Ball jars:

Then I began transferring all of the paint into the glass jars one by one.  I shook the cans before pouring them into the jars & used a wooden paint stirrer to scrape out as much paint as I could (the wooden stirrer worked better than using a brush, as it much easier to rinse between colors).

Since I didn't have any labels made yet, I also made sure to jot down the paint colors on a piece of washi tape & stuck them to the jars temporarily.  Using Jen's idea, I created a quick Paint Reference Sheet to catalog all of the paint brands, colors, sheen, project/room info, & used a Q-tip to swatch the paints:

Once the paint was dry I stuck the reference sheet into a page protector & added it to our "Home Reference" binder:

For labels, I bought a pack of round adhesive 2.5" Avery labels from Office Max & used their online tool to create my own custom labels:

I still need to finish organizing and labeling some of our shelves & bins....but we're getting closer to a clean & organized garage!

Mel
:)