How to Clean Paintbrushes: Water-Based Paint

Series Summary

Home remodeling is a great way to repair and replace broken items in a home. Additionally, home remodeling can bring an outdated home to contemporary standards or can maintain the classic or historical look of the home. Home repair is often the last thing homeowners want to spend money and time on. However, as many DIYers know, homeowners can do their own home repair with instructions from home renovation and construction professionals. In this free video series on home maintenance, a licensed remodeling specialist demonstrates several home upkeep tips. Find out how to diagnose problems with household appliances such as the refrigerator, the dishwasher, the AC unit and the microwave. Get harsh stains out of carpet, and find out how to measure for curtains and blinds. Maintain a home on a regular basis to keep it clean, organized and updated.

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Tim Gipson, and I want to talk to you about how to clean a paintbrush. Now, most of the paints that we use today are latex base or acrylic base, which is a water base paint. So, when you're done with you're painting, all your clean up can be done in the sink. Now here we have a brush were finished with. And the first thing we want to do now, the most basic thing to do, is you want to run, you want to use a lot of water. Now typically the warm water will work best, and what you want to do is go ahead and get you're fingers in and get a little dirty cause the paint will come off. You want to rub lightly, and you want to rub with the bristles. So, away from the handle down to the end. So, what you want to do is, you're just working the paint out of the brush. And you want to flip and you want to do this on both sides. Now, if you've been doing a lot of work and what happens is some of that paint will dry up towards the top of the brush. In that case, it's good to have a tool such as this, because then you can loosen up a lot of that paint by putting the comb, and essentially, you're just combing the paintbrush. But what that will do is help squeeze some the paint out, but it also maybe removes some of those pieces of paint that have somewhat hardened. And you're going to want to do that on both sides. Now, it never hurts too, to make sure you maintain your paintbrushes properly. You can take any kind of household soap and just use a little bit. Then you can actually clean your brush, get some of your suds up, and then rinse it out. The most important thing, is when you do finish rinsing your paintbrush, you want to make sure you give it some shakes, to get that excess water out. Come back and rinse some more. Now also, the way the paintbrush is designed, it will actually draw the paint in. So hold it upside down and get some of that paint and then what you want to do is you want to work your paint brush back and forth, back and forth, and that will help draw the paint out that's up in there. And again to finish up, shake your paintbrush out. And also, a good tip is to take some paper towel, and double it over. This will help keep your paintbrush soft, is to roll your paintbrush up in a paper towel. So, if you do these steps, with cleaning your paintbrush, you will be able to use your paintbrush over and over again. I'm Tim Gibson, and that's how to properly clean a paintbrush."