Painted Brick -
Dull, peeling paint on this beautiful old neo-Italian house made it the eyesore of an upscale neighborhood. The old common clay bricks, which are softer than today's high-fired bricks, had been painted twice with oil-based paint. The combination of the brick's porosity and the oil paint's ability to penetrate the surface made for a tough cleaning combination.
An important stage of the process was wrapping the house in plastic, so the cleaning solutions can work for 24 hours. The entire process, start to finish, took about three days.
If you don't yet know your neighbors, the next step will guarantee that you'll meet them. This picture shows two stages of paint removal on the front of the house: most of the first layer of paint has been removed from the top half of the home, and the second layer of paint has been successfully removed from the lower half of the house. Extra treatments were applied to spot areas in order to ensure a uniform final finish.
Once the paint was removed, a layer of soot left over from the coal era, (seen particularly heavy on the left and right of the photo, made it clear why the house may have been painted in the first place.
Soot requires different treatment from paint. Typically, we steam it off. Note that we protect the shrubs every step of the way.
We discovered that the early 20th century addition (rear of house, above) had used a slightly different color of brick from the original structure. Cleaning the soot from the old part of the house helped remove much of the color difference that can be seen in this picture. The remaining slight color difference vanished completely when a downspout was moved to the color line --- an effective fool-the-eye trick.
The house now deserves it's historic neighborhood setting.
