Painting the Exterior Brick

This update will depict how I made the very dated brick on the front of the house look modern. The only real option here was to paint it.

Step one was to determine which color I wanted to go with. I had done this back when I had gutters put on the house. I looked through the sample colors available for the gutters (which I got from the gutter contractor), and picked what looked the most appealing at the time.

 I had the gutter guys use the color I selected for the downspout that would go in front of the brick. I retrospect, the color is a little darker than I'd like. It still looks a world better than it did pre-paint, and I have received many compliments from the neighbors on the finished brick.

 Here are the paint and primer I used. Bull's Eye white primer, and exterior grade latex paint.

 The brick took about 3 gallons of primer, and about 1 1/2 gallons of paint. It was really sucking up the primer! Using white primer may not have been the best idea, considering how dark my paint was. It meant that I had to do 2 (and in some spots 3) coats of paint to properly cover the primer. That was a bit more work, but the end result looks better for the effort.

 The first thing I had to do was dig out a bunch of the dirt from next to and inside the planter by the front door. Then I had to wash the brick well. It was really dirty, and there plants clinging to it in some spots. I didn't have a power sprayer, so I used the garden hose and a thick brush intended for scrubbing floors.

Next I taped off everything that I didn't want to get paint on with painter's tape. After that, it was time to prime the bricks. This step seemed to take forever; since I wanted to be sure to cover the brick, and more importantly the mortar, completely.

I let the primer dry overnight, and then it was time to put on the paint. As I mentioned above, it took multiple coats to properly cover the white primer with such dark paint. I could have saved some effort here had I gone with dark primer.

That's it for now. You can see that just painting this brick made a world of difference to the appearance of the house.