Nothing scares people like a garage full of old paint. They imagine their house festering into a kind of Love Canal. A good friend of mine left a can of lime green primer on her stoop the other night knowing that I was going to stop by. “You know what to do with this don’t you,” she asked? Some people hate recycling and are fine about pouring their mess into the ground-or down a sewer-for the earth to soak up. “It’s only water based,” one guy told me. So is hemlock tea and look what happened to Socrates. As an old buddy who liked crossword puzzles once told me , “Don’t defecate where you habitate.” I agree. Here’s what you do with old paint.
Like with most things there is a slow easy way to dispose of paint and a quick, less easy way. First, the easy way. You probably only think of that paint store in your garage once every few months so, forget about it one more time-only this time open the cans first. When you think about it again in a month or two the paint will be all dried up and you can put the open cans out with the morning garbage.The less easy but faster solution is to mix kitty litter in with the paint. Stir the kitty litter right into the can until it is too thick to stir anymore. By the next morning the whole thing will be as hard as one of my famous, diamond hard oatmeal cookies that are loved by dentists all over Westchester. Leave the cans open and put them out with the trash.
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Have fun painting
