Use Your Putty Tool For A Neat Hack Next Time You Paint

A fresh coat of paint can really revamp your space, but painting your walls is a notoriously long and messy process. Conventional knowledge would involve sticking lines of painter's tape along the edges of your floor and ceiling to prevent paint splashing onto other surfaces, as well as to cover features such as windows. This process can be especially time consuming if you're doing primer and paint in different colors, and adding an accent wall and design that fits your style. However, if you're confident in your painting skills, try breaking out your putty knife tool for a quick paint hack that might help you nail the corners in a fraction of the time.

The idea behind this hack is simple. Rather than spacing out painter's tape across the full length of your wall, you can take your paint roller or brush and ascend the corner a few inches at a time, following along that path with the flat end of the putty tool. If you do it right, any excess paint from the edge of the roller or brush will cover the knife rather than the adjoining wall. Plus, this tool is flat enough that your new paint color will get right into the corner without too substantive a gap. 

There are some caveats to the usefulness of this technique; it is still possible for paint to go underneath the knife, or for the metal tool to drag and mark your walls. However, using a plastic instrument could reduce wall damage, and you can reduce the likelihood of by continuing to use tools like painter's tape as well.

Choosing the right kind of painter's tape is such a tried and true method for finishing a home's interior that you might wonder why it's worth going off-script in the first place. As mentioned, this putty tool hack has the potential to be much faster than if you spend time sticking and removing tape barriers. This is especially useful if you're trying to paint multiple different wall colors next to one another and don't want to wait for the first accent wall to dry for future tape application. A putty tool is also reusable in ways that tape is not, especially given tape can begin to deteriorate if left for too long.

Using a putty tool as a mobile barrier also beats out other home DIY paint hacks like using a file folder to line your corner, as the knife is specifically designed to be held in a way that's more comfortable than unwieldy moving edges. It's also more likely to protect your walls than buying tools like angled brushes to get into the corners (though, once again, a combination of the two could help minimize mistakes altogether). A putty knife might also be the quickest pick-up-and-go tool if problems like paint cracking or blistering arise and you need to repaint the walls without tearing apart the whole room again, so it's worth keeping one on hand for your next big interior redesign.