A Step-by-Step Guide to Reviving Old Paint ...Middle East

If you’ve ever painted a room in your house or apartment, you know the pain of storing leftover paint. You pour the excess from the rolling pan into the paint can, you tap the lid back into place with a hammer, and you stick the old can somewhere out of the way, where you promptly forget about it. Then the day comes when you need to touch up the room or repaint it entirely, and you haul that old can out from its hiding place, only to discover that time has not been kind to your paint.

If your old paint hasn’t aged well—it’s skinned over, chunky, or otherwise dubious—but you really don’t want to spend money on a fresh can just to do some touch up work, you can try to revive the paint. This happened to me recently: I had an old five-gallon bucket of gray paint with about a gallon of paint left in it, and when I opened it up, it looked like this:

My old, chunky gray paint Credit: Jeff Somers

First, a few quick caveats: Not all paint can be brought back to life. It needs to be mostly liquid, even if it’s chunky and skinned over—if it’s totally hardened, just toss it in the trash. A few other things to check for:

Thinned. If you have already thinned the paint with water (for water-based paints) or paint thinner (for oil-based paints), you probably won’t be able to bring it back.

If you see these signs, toss the paint and resign yourself to buying a fresh can. Otherwise, come with me on a paint-resurrection adventure.

How to revive old paint

My paint had never been thinned, and while it was chunky, it was still liquid. It didn’t smell bad, so I thought I had a pretty good shot at bringing it back. Here’s what you need on hand to try this:

Everything you need to revive your old paint. Credit: Jeff Somers

Screen. You can buy disposable paint filters or paint filter bags, but you can also use an old aluminum window screen, or a piece of fiberglass screen. I happened to have a bunch of fiberglass screen left over from another project, so I cut a piece of that.

Paint thinner. If your paint is water-based, you can thin it with some warm water. Mine is oil-based, so I need paint thinner—I had mineral spirits on hand, so I used that.

Once you have all your materials, your first step is to thin the paint a little. Add a small amount of water or paint thinner, then stir the paint, starting off at a low setting and increasing the power gradually.

Thinning my paint with some mineral spirits. Credit: Jeff Somers Stirring out some of the chunks in the paint. Credit: Jeff Somers

Next, you screen the paint. Attach your screen to your bucket—in my case, I just wrapped the fiberglass screen around the lid and taped it into place:

My high-tech paint screening device. Credit: Jeff Somers

Then, I poured the partially thinned paint into the bucket through the filter:

Screening my paint. Credit: Jeff Somers

I let the paint drip through the filter for a few minutes. This screened out the remaining chunks, leaving me with a supply of usable paint in my bucket:

My thinned, screened, and stirred paint, ready to use. Credit: Jeff Somers

I didn’t need much; honestly, if you’re going to repaint the whole room, you probably shouldn’t rely on old paint you’ve thinned and screened. But for a small touch-up job, this spared me from having to run out and buy a fresh can of paint. It worked well, the paint adhered without problems and matched up reasonably well with the old coat. I plan to prime and paint the room again next year, so it doesn’t have to last forever, either. Once I was done, I disposed of the remnants at my city’s recycling center so it’s no longer haunting my closet.

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