Can You Reuse a Paint Roller for a Different Color

Written By azserted Friday, November 19, 2021 Add Comment Edit

We are buying another dumb house, I guess we haven't learned our lesson yet.
About five acres of painting to do, and my wifey threw out all of our painting supplies when we moved. Oh, right, we didn't need those. They didn't fit in the truck anyway, so I guess this is another opportunity to spur the economy..
But that's a thread for CSM. Or inmates. Or I should stop complaining about all the tools that are missing. Mumble grumble, bugger it, beats being single by a loooooooong shot.
Right, paint roller covers, do you wash yours? Have a good tip on how to do it without making a damn mess of the kitchen/bathroom? This new/old house doesn't have a utility sink yet, so I will be attempting to keep this painting stuff fresh for constant reuse (hmm... didn't like that color after all.. ok, I can paint it again) for the next 3, 6, oh hell forever.

Do you use a gadget? Centrifuge, As Seen On TV doodad, something you made, hose it out in the grass?

Do you buy the cheap roller covers, or the woven wool ones?

Is it worth the trouble to tape off everything so your house looks like the set of E.T. and just use a sprayer?

How about those power roller jobbers? Worth a darn?

Apparently I can't paint the carpet or tile, so I better get more dropcloths, nobody knows what happened to ours. Maybe this time I will just buy the used vinyl billboards the local billboard company sells.

Also, while we are at it, what about paint? Is the less expensive MalWart stuff good enough, or do I have to sell plasma for the Benjamin Franklin's Blood stuff at the home improvement warehouses?
Traditional wisdom is don't cheap out on the paint or the prep. A good trim brush and a good roller is worth it.
You need a brush comb and a 5 in 1 tool

That half round is to scrape the paint out of your roller.

Don't bother cleaning the roller. Scrape the cover to reclaim as much paint as you can with out shredding the cover.

If you want to reuse it using the same color, wrap it tight in saran and refrigerate it for a short time and it can be reused - but it begs the question why you would even bother.
Marvellous, somebody else in the same boat. We are doing our house up to sell & I have thought about the same issues and come to the conclusion that cheap is fine if you have the time to do a good job. I use cheap roller mitts & if they are not going to be used for a few days wash them in a bucket with a hose running into it. They stay fresh in a plastic bag if you squeeze all the air out, same with brushes.
I put as much time into prep as possible, use wide masking tape on the floor / carpet edges & have become a black belt at touching in with a paint brush.
I hope somebody gives you professional info...
Revelations!!!!!!
Things that I hate worse than painting...
The runs....

That is all.
Don't buy bargain basement roller covers, litte bits of material fall out of them and stick to your wall.
Buy medium priced roller covers and wrap them in Glad Wrap (cling wrap, sandwich wrap whatever you call it) after the first coat, that will keep them moist for 2 hours, then put the second coat on and throw them away. You can do the same with brushes but they are easier to wash out.

This is only for acrylic and other water based apints.
This is the main trade that has seen me through University study for the last 6 years. I'm still studying and still painting, mostly working for myself on high-end very tricky and detailed domestic jobs. Hopefully not for much longer
There are lots of tricks to painting, but there are very few shortcuts. A good job takes a lot of good hard work. Think prep, prep, prep and more prep, and for a treat at the end you get to put a little paint on.
And like any other trade, good quality tools and materials are almost always worth the investment (and pay forthems soon after).

Way too much of my work is fixing up after horrible DIY efforts- but thats for a another thread.
Good luck.
Prep work is key to a good final finish.
I hired someone to paint my house. He was good and did a good,job. Money well spent.
Only use power tools if you are doing a lot of painting. Power rollers are fast, but take half an hour or more to clean. We had 2 or 3 guys painting corners and one guy painting the big flat spaces with the large Wagner roller. We painted about 40 rooms of budget motel.

At the end of the day, I put the roller into a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. Same with the brushes. Remove the air,then throw in a second bag to be safe. Really good brushes can be washed.

I used plastic drop cloths but finally bought a cloth one. They are better and absorb spilled paint.

Good luck.
fung Been here awhile

Get a paint brush spinner. You can use it for cleaning your rollers and brushes. I paint often at work, and like to use a 3/4 nap. Holds more paint and does not leave roller lines. I wash the rollers with hose or sink, then spin them and rinse and spin. A quality roller and brush can last for a good while. Get some canvas drop cloths, well worth. The money and last for ever. This is just my 2 cents. And this works well for me, years of trial and error. Best of luck!
Don't cheap out. Buy good brushes and roller covers (I like Purdy). Don't mess with a small paint tray. Get an empty 5 gall. bucket and screen. Pour a couple gallons of paint into the bucket and work from there.
I like the new "frog" brand tape for taping off the ceiling line. I run the frog tape around the room, then hit it with the white paint used on the ceiling to seal it off. The result is very clean lines. Otherwise, you'll have to do it all by hand trying to pull a clean edge with the brush.

Lastly, buy good paint. Out here in CA, Dunn-Edwards is the best I've found. Nice heavier clay base, holds a line very well. Some of the cheap paints like Behr at Home Depot don't work well for me.

For drop clothes, don't use the saran wrap POS one's from the home store. Go to harbor freight and get the heavy canvas clothes. They have a nice one that's 3' x 12' that works great; get a few of those.
Purdy rollers. Unless your walls are textured and then it doesn't matter how much lint you leave.
The 3 packs tend to create a flat spot on the cover. It can show on a floor but maybe not on walls. If you save the plastic wrapper from a single pack, you can just slide the roller head back in the plastic bag and twist closed. It will keep for days if kept cool. Longer if you add a bit of water. This is only for latex of course, I throw my oil rollers, it's not worth the solvents.
Not to start a paint war but I have always read that Behr makes a pretty decent paint.
I'll let others debate as to whether you should clean rollers at all, but if you do, the best way I've found is to scrape them well with the half-round cutout in a scraper blade as someone else has already posted here, then clean them in a bathtub. Just get the water running and roll the roller back and forth in the water in the tub until no more paint is coming out.
I second wrapping the roller and reusing it without cleaning it if you are continuing with the same color. I've never refrigerated, just wrapped, and that was good for at least a week.

I painted as part of a job doing apartment maintenance, so it wasn't full-time painting, but still quite a bit. We never washed our rollers or brushes, just wrapped them and used them again on the next apartment. We used genuine sheep's wool rollers, 3/4" nap, 18" wide. For raised panel doors, we had a 9" or so roller with 1.5" nap (yeah, really, I called it the Great Woolly Mammoth). Slop the paint on with that, then go over it with a brush to make it look nice, and poof, the door is painted.

A handle for your roller is your friend. If you're going for fixed length, 4 to 5 feet seems to be about right, but you can't use that in hallways. If you have a significant amount of hallway to paint, get yourself a 1' handle as well. Your wrists will thank you.

Here in Denver there is a company that sells recycled paint. I was skeptical, but went ahead and tried it. I am very impressed. High quality paint, mixed to whatever color I want (although I chose some of their 75 or so predefined colors), for $12 / gallon. The drawback with this outfit is that I have to order the paint a day in advance, and they're not open evenings. But when buying 8 gallons of paint, it was worth it. I repeat that it was really good paint.
I made a spinner out of a cheap roller handle and length of threaded bar.
I give it a quick wash, then spin, then wash again, then spin. It's dry enough to use straight away with a different colour.
You can make the cheap roller covers less linty by using some masking tape wrapped around your fingers to remove the lint before use. I do this with the pricey ones too, they all lose a little bit of lint. Better on the tape than on the wall.
A professional painter friend of mine would pull a bag over the brush and or roller and throw it in the freezer for overnight storage, if he was going to paint with the same color next day.
I've done my fair share of painting over the years. Don't cheap out on the paint. An expensive paint will cover in two coats, cheap paint will take many, many more.
Ben Moore Aura is the best paint I have ever used ,and it better be at $62 per gallon. One hour for second coat, hardly any smell, hides brush marks beautifully. This is the best paint, IMHO.

Any of the Ben paints are going to be better than anything you buy at Home Depot and the like. paint and primer in one is bull, paint will stick to anything, but if you want uniform surface, you should still prime. Exception: The Aura is truly self priming on almost anything, but using it on new sheetrock would be waste of money.

Go to your Ben Moore paint store and ask for the OOPS pile. Right mixes as far as paint goes, wrong color for the customer. I was just repainting my rental, and needed about 8 gallons. I found all except one in the OOPS pile, at $8 - $16 per gallon. Those were all Ben paints, some Ben, one Aura, some Reagal. I did not care about colors, so in the two trips I took I found what worked together, and was neutral enough for a rental.

Most paint places have OOPS piles, so give it a try.

Oh, Purdy rollers are good enough for most jobs. Even the Ace covers are good.
With cheap rollers wash them out with water first if you are doing a flat surface. I didn't reliease that a 5 in one tool will work to scrape rollers. I use cling rap between coats on rollers and brushes. I have a metal try that I use a big degradeable liner on. I'm painting the house now in about 3 different colors plus primer. I have a tray for each one. As I move from room to room I just pour out the extra paint and let it dry. Reuse the tray for the same color. Works well. My wife likes to paint. I'm doing all the texture and patching as well as the tile and grouting. She is doing all the painting. She cuts in very maticulasly with a artist brush and no tape (textured wall and ceiling with white ceiling and colored walls). A PITA for sure, but looks really good when its done.
More knowledge already expressed here than I have. But I've a little in trying to repaint every inch of our 1900sq ft home. Do buy good paint. I bought a few buckets of cheap (on sale!) 2.5gallon bright white ceiling paint and it SUCKS. I have to put at least two coats of it on and that's over a pale yellow from the previous owner. Trying to roll that on a beamed-ceiling with 2+ coats is a miserable experience.
You sir must have purchased a 4 in 1 with a stylish circular thingy ma-bob.
It is a different tool.