Our house has a detached garage, which, as a DIYer, can sometimes pose challenges. Because the garage is unheated and uninsulated, I basically have a spray paint season, and then a long period of months when it’s too cold to paint in the garage. And the months of cold weather also make spray paint storage a challenge.
A couple of years ago, I added shelves in our utility room to store some of our paint and painting supplies. I did a lot of research to determine if it was safe to store paint near our furnace and water heater, and in doing so determined that while latex and water based paints are ok, oil based and spray paint couldn’t be stored in this space. {You can read all of my findings about proper paint storage in this post.}
So no to the garage, and no to the utility room… where could store my spray paint?
For the last couple of years, I’ve had the two bins of spray paint on a shelf in our main floor storage closet… but the bins were heavy and I was always nervous lifting them on and off the shelf above my head.
Finally, I came up with a better solution! I saw the genius way that Cassie of Hi Sugarplum was storing spray paint on the wall of her garage using a shoe bag, and I realized that hanging a shoe bag {affiliate link} on the back of the closet door would be the perfect way to keep my spray paint organized inside the house without heavy bins taking up valuable shelf space.
The rest of the closet is still very much a work in progress, but at least my spray paint is now nicely organized!
I didn’t want to damage the nice wood door of the closet, so I hung the shoe bag from the top of the door using ribbon and thumbtacks {read the details here}.
For this organization project, I used an extra shoe bag that I already had on-hand, and only one can fits in each pocket. This was perfect for the spray paint I currently have, and since I tend to use up spray paint pretty quickly, it will always provide enough stroage space. But if, in the future, I wish I had more space, I could always replace this narrow shoe bag with a larger one with more pockets, or that could fit two cans per pocket.
This shoe bag also has two smaller horizontal pockets at the top. I’m using one pocket to store all of my stain touch-up markers {here’s how I use them}.
I have several different colors of stain markers that I use for furniture, floors, baseboards, etc. I label the bottom of the markers with a Sharpie so I can remember which color matches which wood in our house.
The other top pocket of the shoe bag is perfect for storing my spray paint comfort grip {affiliate link}. If you’ve done a lot of spray painting, then you know that pushing down on that little nozzle can result in quite the finger cramp. The comfort grip solves this problem by giving you a larger, more comfortable triger.
Looking for more quick and easy five minute organizing ideas? You’ll find lots of them here. And these are some of my favorite spray paint projects:
