Helpful blogging

How to paint straight lines on trim using a wet rag and a putty knife

How many of you guys ever tried painting any room in your house, and ended up getting the paint on everywhere?. And i mean all places possible like ceilings, crown moldings, baseboards and windows/doors casings... And you end up so dissapointed with your work that the only way possible to fix it is calling a professional painter to come an do it for you. Well today i am gonna show you a very simple 2 step technique you can use to achieve nice and professional lines on trim and save a lot of money doing it by yourself! .

This is what you will need:

3" or 3.5" Corona brush
Putty knife or five in one
A rag and a bucket with water

How to do it

Keep in mind that the process i recommend for this technique to work properly, is painting all the trim first. The reason why.. is you have to make sure when you are painting the edge of the trim, to get at least one inch of trim paint on the wall(as shown in the picture below). Trim paint has a latex base, and when it dries it makes it very easy to slide the putty knife with the wet rag.

First step: "Cutting in"

Dip your brush with a reasonable amount of paint, avoid getting to much on it. Slowly start cutting in as you would normally do trying to get as close as possible to the window, but only letting the very tip on the bristles do the job

Second step: "Ragging the paint"

Put your rag in the bucket with water and squeeze it leaving it barely wet. Wrap your five in one or putty knife with it and position it at the very edge of the wall and window casing. Firmly press it and slowly begin sliding it up or down(depends on your position). Repeat this as much as you need to achieved the desired result.

Final Result

The final result is professional with a perfect straight line and not even a single drop of paint on the casing, or any paint bleeding you would get if you were using tape.

You can use this technique on baseboard and crown molding too. Here is another example on crown molding.

The result is nice and clean

Keep in mind

This steps are designed for the first coat, you can either first roll or cut in the walls.

For the second coat you need to cut in the walls first. In the first coat you already drew your lines with your putty knife, so the only thing you have to do is follow them on the second coat being careful and trying not to mess them up.(you dont have to get real close to the line, try to stay at least a quarter inch away from it). Then roll your walls, so you can erase your brush marks.

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What is Slice the pie? It is a website that was created back in 2007 to give aspiring musicians a chance to have their music rated and reviewed. This can lead them on rasing funds for creating their first musical album. The fans (or scouts as they are referred to on the site)get to write reviews and rate their music.. which enables them to earn money themselves.

How does it work?

Each artist submits three tracks and these are submitted to the various Scout Rooms depending on the type of music. The Scouts are randomly given tracks which they don’t know who the artist name is nor the name of the track. Once they have reviewed that piece of music the name of the track and the artist is revealed. This would seem to make the system of reviewing fairer because you can’t just vote on recommendations from your friends. Each music track has to have thirty separate reviews before their artist rating can be assessed. Only the top rated artists from each genre will be moved into the Showcase.

How does the process of reviewing music work?

When signing up, you’re asked to rate different genres of music on a “Love to Hate” scale, so in theory they play more of that music for you. However I find they will push all sorts of music your way, so be prepared to rate a variety of tunes. If you really don’t feel comfortable rating a song, you can always skip it. Here’s how it works – you’re given the task of listening to a song, writing a review, and then ranking it on a 1 to 10 scale. You have to wait 90 seconds after the song starts playing to submit the review, but you can take as long as you want to actually write it out.

A look at the basic screen

You have to be thoughtful and varied with your reviews – they won’t let you say the same thing over and over again in a copy/paste fashion. Even if you write out similiar reviews, you’ll find that after a few you’ll get stuck with a warning saying “that review looks familiar! try writing something original!” You’re given an “energy” bar that starts out with 10 energy points. Each review you submit costs you 1 energy, but you regain a new energy every 3 minutes. I suppose this is to prevent people from submitting reviews too fast, but I find it replenishes to 10 rather quickly and never got anywhere near 0! (but maybe I am just slow..)

How much do i get paid by review?

Everyone starts off with a base salary of 2 cents per review, but if you submit lots of helpful reviews you can work your way up to a base salary of 4 cents. That sounds ridiculously low, but that is just the base rate – the more detailed, helpful and high quality review you can provide them, the more you will be paid. I never was only paid just 2 cents – here I reviewed probably about 10 songs and got paid around 15 cents per review. I did take my time and tried to write something helpful and constructive for each song.g

Slice the pie proof of payment

Note: Once you cash out, your reviews are sent to be reviewed by an actual human and can take up to 5 days to transfer to your Paypal account. I would make sure you’re not writing anything inappropriate or cruel because you may risk them rejecting your reviews and not paying you for all the hard work you did

My final opinion

Overall this site is awesome and completely LEGITIMATE and it can be a really enjoyable activity. What’s important to remember here is that this site is for people who appreciate music and are interesting in helping out new bands – not just those looking for a paycheck! Sure, the extra money is cool, and it can be a really fun hobby for music lovers willing to help out bands with some constructive critisicm. However it’s very time consuming and it’s a lot more in depth than just listening to music. You can’t expect to turn on the music, let it play in the background while you play around on Facebook/Youtube … You really need to dedicate yourself to the song and write the review as you listen to make it helpful and worthwile. You also need a fairly good grasp of music and the vocabulary involved – so if you don’t really know any technical aspects of music, you can do some research to write better reviews.