 Hi guys. So I'm sorry about the weird lighting, but this is my upstairs hall guest bathroom. It's a first for me filming a YouTube video in the bathroom. Anyway, so this is where I clean my art tools. And this is what started the whole idea of being more environmentally conscious about what I do with my art supplies and disposing of the cleaning water and that sort of thing, even more than I already was. Because the rag, I said in a prior video about the rags, I've been doing the rag thing for years, literally years, a very long time. But I, you know, in the old house we had a utility sink. And to be honest, I wasn't super conscious about what I was doing. I would just dump whatever down the sink. And yeah, that probably was not a good thing. Up here, we don't have a utility sink. So I need to not only keep the bathroom looking nice, but then I thought, you know, it's probably also a good thing to not dump all that stuff down the piping into the sewer system. It's not a good idea. So what can I do differently that I wasn't doing that would help me alleviate some of those issues. So we're going to go over that today. So join me in my bathroom and let's see what I'm doing. And of course, as usual, if you guys have any ideas, something that you do that works for you, do share either here on YouTube in the comments below, or if you're in my Facebook group, a life of art and self expression, I would love for you to share over there. Not everybody has the same setup or the same systems. So what I'm doing might not work for you, but maybe what somebody else is doing will. And so let's share and let's compare notes. All right, let me get everything set up so that I'm not like doing this vlog style. And I'll be right back. Okay, the first thing I'm going to say about this bathroom is it's big. And I'm lucky because it has two sinks, one here, and one there. It also has two under sink cabinets. And this big bank of drawers. So plus this is the guest bathroom. So I'm able to utilize some of the space for my art tool cleaning stuff, like this top drawer. There you go. So I have a couple of trays in here. This one is a cafeteria style tray food tray with a right one of my rags in it. That's generally where I put stuff after I've cleaned it that needs to dry. Right now it has my little cake I've soaked for my watercolor brushes in it because it was wet. I have a couple of old and sort of past kitchen sponges, but they work well for up here. I do have this brush. This is wet. That's why it's there. This finger brush works great for scrubbing some things. I have this. I think it's some sort of makeup blending tool. It not only works well for scraping some of the hard crusty bits out of your paint brushes after they've been soaking, but it works great for getting the paint out from under your fingernails. As does this old pair of tweezers. This is for cleaning makeup brushes. Again, it works great for rubbing your paint brushes against so that you can clean them and then have some spare different kinds of brush cleaning soap. They just live in here and when company comes over, I don't have to worry about moving things around. I can just put close a drawer. I can have a bunch of paint brushes in here drying, but I can just close the drawer. While they're soaking, where am I keeping them? Well, when company comes over I hide everything, which I'll show you at the end, but this is my jar. I've had this jar. It's from the old house. It has about, I don't know, that much water in it with a couple tablespoons of Murphy's oil soap. The brush is sitting here and soaked sometimes for too long, but anyway. This is one of my famous rags because I'm not going to use the fancy kitchen towels. I mean bathroom towels. So when I need to dry things on, I have a rag usually right here. And then this is one of my two buckets. I'm going to get my tripod so I can get both hands in here and show you what I do and I'll be right back. Okay. So this is your standard five gallon bucket with a lid and I actually have a spare one under the sink, which I'll show you in a minute. I cut a hole in the lid that was big enough to hold this metal strainer. This needs to actually be dumped. And I also put usually, I need to put a new one, a coffee filter. Why the coffee filter? Because the holes in the metal strainer, while they're small, which is why I use the metal one over plastic. The holes are smaller. They're not quite small enough to catch all of the paint particles that I want to catch. And of course, because I'm on camera, I can't do this. There we go. So they're not quite small enough to catch all the particles that I want to catch. I want to try to catch as much as I can and you'll see by how dyed this paper towel is, and I don't know if you can catch it on camera, but there's little pieces of granules of pigments and minerals on the coffee filter. I want to try to catch as much of that as I can before it goes into the bucket. I'm going to put this on my rag up there. So when I'm dumping out my paint water or the water the brushes are soaking in or the water I've washed the brushes in, it all goes through here and into the bucket below. This is really gross, but this is actually a clean day and that's what it looks like. I don't know if you can see that on camera or not. Now, when the bucket gets to be about halfway or so full, because if it gets more than that, it's hard for me to get it down the stairs. If it's been sitting here for a while like this has and while the top well cloudy is relatively clean and sludge free for lack of a better word, I can dump the top layer of water down the toilet and not the sludge that's at the bottom and I can just leave the sludge in the bottom. In the wintertime I can, after a while you get a lot of sludge in the bottom and in the wintertime I will take a cardboard box and put it into a giant plastic garbage bag and I'll dump the sludge into the garbage bag and just let it freeze and soak up in the cardboard and then put it in the garbage, but that way it's not going into the water system. If I only have this much water, I won't put any of it down the toilet. I will just take the whole thing and do that same thing and dump it in the cardboard in the plastic bag and just let it absorb the cardboard, absorb it and then dispose of it that way. You also can let, if you live in a warm place or a place where it's summertime, you can let this out in the sun and let the water evaporate until there's just dried crusty bits at the bottom and then pick the crusty bits out and dispose of them, which is why I have two buckets. So I have a spare bucket under the sink and it fits under the sink and when one is outside with the water evaporating, I can just change out the lid and I can have this one up here, disposing of more water. Now, in an effort to keep the sink clean when I am cleaning, I have these. This is more just more random like brush cleaning soap, different kinds. I generally just use Murphy's Oil soap, but I've been gifted a few other brands and so I've been trying them out. So these again are small plastic paint buckets. These are from the hardware store or Walmart, Fred Mayer or something like that. You can get these anywhere, a couple different sizes. These both fit in the sink under the faucet and so after I've dumped this water in here, I put the brushes in here. I wash the brushes in here. I don't just wash the brushes in the sink and let all the random bits that are falling off the paintbrush go down the drain and don't even do that. As I'm washing the brushes, of course this will fill up and get gross and I will dump it down into the bucket and then I'll keep washing brushes. At some point, the brush is relatively clean and then I do give it a clear rinse without a bucket in the sink and that works. But I do capture as much of the paint sludgy gross water into my five down bucket as I can. I don't want any of it if I can help it to go down the drain. So and these are all things from the hardware store. This big blue thing, in case you're wondering, I showed you the little pink one for cleaning makeup brushes. This is the same thing. You can get these at Amazon. You can get them on Wish or AliExpress. You probably can get them at Ulta or the Ford, but you're probably going to pay more. They were really cheap. These are from Wish. They were really cheap. As I said, I also use coffee filters to line the five gallon bucket and metal strainers in the lids of the bucket. This is a set of three different sizes. I think the one that's in here is the large one. These are from Amazon, but you can get them at Walmart or sometimes the Dollar Tree. I would not cut the hole in the lid until you have one to put in there, but you want this fine mesh metal strainer because the holes are smaller and the strainer itself is going to catch a lot of stuff and then the coffee filter will catch more. That being said, don't just pick up one, pick up two or more because you want to back up because after a while, if you can see that, they start to look like that. And at some point, to be honest, you just get tired of cleaning it. That being said, you could pull the metal out of here and probably reuse it in some mixed media. It's got all these wonderful paint chips and stuff to stuff to it. If you like grungy mixed media, I mean, it's kind of cool. It won't go to waste. When I do have a company coming over. Oh, and by the way, this is another nylon cutting board, and this is for laying the brushes on. And remember before I said I have this. So sometimes with your brushes, you have chunks of things in the brush that don't come out from just soaking them in water. So you need to lay the brush flat on a board and then you need to scrape the chunks out. That's what this board is for. And that's what this is for. And again, I do that over one of the smaller plastic buckets. But when company is coming over, this fits under the sink. And if I do happen to have both buckets upstairs, one of them will fit under this sink and the other one fits under the other sink. And I do make sure that I wipe down the sink I do use up here, up here, here, here. Before I'm done, I don't leave any like dry paint blobs in the sink or anything like that. Getting down on the floor is easy. Getting up is harder. I do make sure before I'm done, any splatters or anything I've gotten on the sink are wiped clean. And so it stays clean and pristine. And when guests come over, again, the two buckets will fit under the sinks. This jar will also fit under the sink as well. The rag can go in the drawer. And then the guests never know otherwise, honestly, unless they get nosy. So what do you do to keep your tools and supplies clean that's environmentally friendly, that we're not creating lots of extra waste if we can help it? And if we do have things that can't be recycled that are waste, what do you do with them? There, of course, is lots of mixed media collagey things you can do. But is there anything else you can do? If you can think of something, I would appreciate you leaving it in the comments below. I'm no expert, as I've said, by any stretch. This is what I do. Maybe you do something different. I'd love to hear about it either here in the comments below or if you're a member of my Facebook group, a life of art and self expression, I'd love to hear it over there. If you want to follow me on social media or support the free content here or on Facebook, you can click on my link tree link. You'll find me on Instagram there. I should say you'll find the link for Instagram, the link for Twitter, my Etsy shop, the Amazon store, the tip jar, Patreon, all that stuff. So check it out. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. Hit that little bell icon if you want to get notifications for new videos. And the most important thing, go out and have a great day and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'll see you later. Bye, guys.