I have spent entirely too much time on my hands and knees cleaning up after myself. Its automatic now, my dropcloth goes down first.

It is amazing what you will find has dropped on the floor, without your knowledge.

Don’t leave paint to dry on your floors, use a dropcloth and avoid another clean up nightmare.

Protect your floors and also your furniture with dropcloths.

Move all the furniture away from your faux finishing painting area at least 5′.

While you’re at the big box store getting your paint, check out your options for a dropcloth. You will find paper, plastic or cloth dropcloths. I have professional dropcloths for obvious reasons.

Try to stay away from plastic dropcloths if you going to be working on carpet. Plastic dropcloths and carpet together is just asking for a slip and fall.

If you’’re on wood or tile, plastic dropcloths work great and they are cheap.

But if you’’re around carpet, stick to something like an old sheet if you don’t want to spring for new canvas dropcloths.

Taping the dropcloth to the baseboard is a good idea if you’’re doing large painted areas. Run a length of tape half on the wall or baseboard and half on the cloth/plastic dropcloth. It should stay put for the entire job.

If you have baseboards or a tile-board, run a strip of tape on top of it while you’’re painting. It will catch the tiny drips that somehow always seem to sneak between the wall and the drop cloth.

When you get ready to paint near the floor, and you’’re already on your hands and knees, strip off this protective tape so you can get up close to the edges.

A professional looking job is one that doesn’t have a white gap where the tape was.

Excerpt from “The Beginners Guide to Professional Finishes: Faux Brick” a THAT Painter Lady Publication teaching Faux Finishes Bricks to Beginner Artists.

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