Patching & Painting with Brushless Paint Tubes

I have a horrible little secret. We hoard paint cans over here as if they were going out of style. Every size, shape, color – even long after that little label from the paint store begins to wear off from old age and we can no longer read the brand, sheen or color composite – still we hoard. Our paint cabinet overfloweth.

When Color-Glide Pro reached out to me regarding their new brushless paint sample tubes (that you fill and label yourself to keep on hand for little touch up projects) a little light in my head went off and I began dreaming of a certain over flowing cabinet suddenly becoming empty and clean. I screen product reviews here pretty thoroughly and I often don’t take on a project that I don’t think will fit in line with how we work on home projects or ones that won’t jive well with the blog. BUT this particular sample landed in my inbox with perfect timing. I’ve been imagining a product just like this and if they hadn’t invented this genius of a little squirt tube, I would have been on it like a fly to honey. It’s that smart.

Here is just a wee selection of paint that a friend and I drug out of our garage a little while back to sort.

Then we opened up all of those cans, made notes on which paint belonged to which rooms (with lots of swatch testing going back and forth since the labels were all practically gone) and used the 10 or so pump + tubes that come with each Color-Glide Pro applicator to reorganize.

I loved that each tube had its own pump. You set the pump into the open can of paint and fill, fill, fill.

The tube is easily recycled afterwards (there would be no way for multiple colors to share the same tube, I thought about it but cleaning would be a mess).

The outside of the tube allows you to label the color name, brand or store, which room the paint is for, the sheen and any other details you’d like to add with a sharpie.

The best part? When it comes time to actually put the now nicely organized paint samples to use. We recently repaired two big plaster spots in our kitchen just a day or so before an appraiser was set to conduct a house tour (for a refinance that we’re in the middle of) and just hours before his arrival I quickly repainted the large blemishes using the brushless applicators in the Color-Glide Pro tubes.

Here’s an in-progress shot (though the paint is still wet in each photo and the texture of the walls makes it appear a little crazy). The end of the tube has a little felt applicator that you gently squeeze paint out onto (kind of like the automatic dish soap dispenser scrubber – do you use that too? – in your kitchen sink). No need for brushes or tape or cleaning of any kind, just shape the tube (there’s a little ball inside to mix everything up) squeeze a bit of paint out onto the felt applicator and rub onto your patch area. When finished, wipe off the felt and pop the plastic lid back on. The plastic lip on the applicator acts as a little barrier between raised surfaces and the paint so I didn’t actually tape off the light switches below, even though I was able to get a perfectly smooth line right along the edge.

Finished! The three different types of trim in the below picture are driving me crazy, but for now the paint looks awesome. Except maybe for where the wall meets ceiling, looks like I have a couple of spots to patch up now that the ceiling has been replastered as well…

I must confess that my paint cabinet in the garage still overfloweth – I had a hard time parting with near full gallons or quarts of paint that I *hope* to use on a future project. But now at the very front of my cabinet sit my paint tubes, ready and waiting for repairs in the house!

It’s nice to know that if we’re patching a hole where a picture frame used to hang in the dining room or replacing trim in the office, I can run out to the garage and grab the correct tube and quickly finish the project – sans all of the paint supplies and clean up that it used to involve (and therefore was always relegated to last on the to-do list).

Thank you to the folks over at Color-Glide Pro for suppling the brushless paint tube applicators for me to try out. Here’s a link to their website for more information and a plethora of application videos. You can also find a pack of four sample tubes available on Amazon with Prime shipping.