How to remove paint from artificial grass: wet, dried, and when it is a patch

Look at the can if it is still around. Latex, acrylic and water-based paints clean up with water while wet and turn to a rubbery skin when dry. Oil-based and alkyd paints, most exterior stains, and spray-can enamels clean up with mineral spirits and cure hard. The fence stain that drips onto turf on the coast is usually an oil-based or water-based deck stain; the house trim is usually latex. If you do not know, put a drop of water on a fresh drip. If it lifts and runs milky, it is latex.

1. Blot, do not wipe. Press a rag straight down onto the spill to lift what it can. Wiping spreads a drip into a smear.
2. Flood. Hose on a shower setting, aimed down through the turf, immediately and for several minutes. Latex is water-soluble until it skins over, which can be twenty minutes in summer. Water carries it down and out through the backing.
3. Keep going until the runoff at the edge is clear rather than milky.
4. Wash. A mild dish-soap solution, one tablespoon per gallon, on a soft brush lifts the last of it from the fibers. The dish soap page covers rinsing the soap back out.
5. Rinse and brush once dry.

Done inside the first half hour, a latex drip leaves nothing behind.

1. Soak. Lay a rag wet with warm soapy water over the spot for fifteen minutes. Dried latex is a rubbery film, and warm water softens it enough to lose its grip on smooth polyethylene.
2. Pick. Work each coated fiber between thumb and fingernail, or a plastic scraper held at a low angle, and peel the paint off the blade. It usually comes away in a strip. This is slow; a saucer-sized spot takes half an hour.
3. Trim what will not peel. Sharp scissors, cutting only the painted tip so the fiber stays close to its neighbors in height.
4. Wash, rinse, brush as above.

Paint that soaked through to the backing and dried there is not coming out, but if the fibers above it are clean it will not show.

The removers for oil-based paint are solvents, and every one of them softens polyethylene and leaves a dull patch. A small drip is a scissors job: trim the coated tips. Spray-paint overspray across a strip along a fence, which is common after a fence job, is the same, one fiber at a time along the strip, and where that is not realistic the honest answer is a patch. The DIY mistakes guide has the reason solvents stay off turf.

A patch is a cut-and-replace of the affected area with matching turf, seam-taped and glued at the edges. It is the right answer when a spill reached the backing over more than a few square inches, when oil-based paint covers more than you are willing to trim, or when the spot has already been cut down to the backing by someone trying to clean it. A patch from matching turf disappears after a season of sun; a bald spot never does. Our turf repair does this from $250. Before the next paint job, a drop cloth taped over the turf along the fence line costs nothing and saves all of the above.

A drip or two is a rag and a hose. A spill, a strip of overspray or anything oil-based is worth a photo sent to us before you start cutting, because the difference between a stain treatment at $75 to $150 and a patch from $250 is usually what has already been tried on it. For an old, faded turf where a patch would show, the clean or replace guide lays out where the line is.