Free Printable Paint Labels: Organize Your Leftover Cans Easily
As I’m sure most households have stashed away somewhere, we had a shameful stack of half-used, dripping, leftover paint cans in our makeshift workshop area. They’ve been project-by-project shoved into the bar cart we now use as a miter saw table in our enclosed porch where most of our wood cutting, staining and painting happens for woodworking projects. We’ve got a solution: printable paint labels.
It was not a good look.
The previous owner of our house painted each room a different, bold color. Living room, navy; dining room, deep purple; kitchen, beige; mudroom, bright blue; guest room, teal; bathroom, yellow; and the list goes on.
We’re trying room-by-room to make the house a more neutral, cohesive palette, but with that comes even more paint tins added to the dozen she left behind, some of which were so rusted and worn we didn’t even know what the original color name was.
Thus, our enclosed porch looked like the elephant graveyard scene from The Lion King, with our dog Molly as the hyena gatekeeper (she gets a good vantage point to bark incessantly at the neighbor’s cat from that porch so she’s out there any chance she gets).
Between the paint cans and the rollers, brushes, grout, thinset, caulk tubes and whatever other tidbits we need to store somewhere that isn’t inside our house or I’ll lose my mind, it’s like an obstacle course of home improvement to make it to the saws.
And that’s not even accounting for the difficulty of sorting through it all to find the one can of living room paint for a tiny touch up when we take a nail out of the wall.
But, much to Alex’s delight because he’s asked me to organize that area at least 15,000 times, it’s now functional, easy to access and nice to look at with the help of these labels I whipped up and a few glass jars for a grand total of $15.
The mason jar situation makes So. Much. More. Space. and I think it’ll actually motivate us to touch up the little pen dashes we’ve made on the walls who-knows-how-many times while trying to get our measurements right for shelves or wall hangings.
I also used my out-of-character burst of energy to clear out the tins we’re never going to use (looking at you, weird bright red we can’t find used anywhere in the house). I also had to keep a couple of drippy tins, like the almost-full ceiling paint tin and the wood stains, but overall it’s a huge difference.
If you’re also on an organizing-everything-in-your-house kick (especially since we’re all at home so much these days), I’ve made the labels printable. I made two versions – one for room paint colors and one for projects, in case you’ve got some leftover paint from a dresser or smaller project like that.
Download Your Printable Paint Labels
Click here to download the free printable labels for room colors
OR
Click here to download the free printable labels for project colors
In addition to those, you’ll need label paper, a permanent marker, and some airtight glass jars (we used these 16oz mason jars from Michaels, but I realized too late that there aren’t any flat sides for nice, smooth labels, so a plain glass jar might work better).
Then you just need to pour your leftover paint into the jars, cut your labels down to size, fill them out and slap them right on there. I recommend pouring your paint before putting the label on in case you spill and have to wipe off the glass.
And there you go – functional, space-saving and, most importantly, pretty to look at!
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