Historic Home Restoration: Stripping Paint From Brick

The wife tasked me with getting our back porch ready for paint.  When we purchased our home with a hard money loan back in 2005, our short-term renovation plan did not included painting the exterior of the property.  However, our appraiser changed his mind at the last second and demanded that we paint the exterior just 48 hours before our refinance deadline for the hard money loan.  Of course, the appraiser was then several days slow in getting back to inspect our home and we had to pay additional interest and fees for busting our hard money deadline.  But this is a whole separate story...

The bottom line is we painted very fast and with little prep work.  You would think that with us in such a hurry we would just avoid taping the brick and paint like complete slobs.  Not so.  But what we discovered when we did our painting six years ago was that the previous painters were.  I always thought that it was the property owners just previous to us that did such a lousy job.  The fun thing about old houses is that there are often clues that let you know who did what and when.  Here is such a clue:

A previous owner had the bad taste of writing directly on the brick; but, since they wrote over top a paint drip, we now know that the sloppy painters did their damage prior to October 15, 1969 when someone named Mike was about 4 feet tall.  Interesting clue.  Here is the travesty that we have been fixing:

Just ignore the peeling green paint.  That's a relic from the quick fix paint job to satisfy the appraiser.   Check out the total neglect in cutting in the paint to the brick.  Pure laziness.

 
Fortunately, paint stripper and goof off are just the right chemicals to fix this.

And of course, don't forget a putty knife and some elbow grease...

Here is what I was up against:

Here is the finished product:

There are several more areas that need attention but this is a good start.  It took me about six hours to undo poor craftsmanship from 50 years ago.  There were 2,600 Saturday mornings between now and the time that this paint was first put on the brick.  The question I want answered is why didn't somebody do this before now?  Certainly they have had an abundance of opportunity.

Posted by Jeremy Peterson
Ogden, Utah Real Estate Broker
Mountain Real Estate Companies
801-390-1480