How to Whitewash Brick

I am so thrilled to share this post!! One of my besties just purchased a new home and it has been a blast helping her choose decorations, paint colors, and even pitching in with some of the renovations! This was a really exciting project, since I have never had the opportunity to work with brick. She went back and forth on painting or whitewashing, which really in our case was really limewashing. There are almost too many opinions and ways of making brick white, but I do believe working with the lime mixture was the way to go. It only required one coat, easy application (just tedious), no blotting, ragging off, maintenance free, dries quickly, let's the brick "breathe", natural reaction, more dimension, and more natural brick qualities shine through. All and all I definitely think she took some great advice from her old Irish traditional roots on this choice!

Materials needed:

• Rubber gloves
• Short cheap stiff bristle brush
• The floppy brushes double the application time and are very hard to work the mixture into the grout lines and around the brick comers
• You will want to throw the brush away after using with the mixture or try paint thinner 
• 2 lb. bag of granulated limestone
• 2 tablespoons of table salt
• 1 can of Helmsman Spar Urethane (clear semi-gloss)
• Can to mix
• Start with mixing 2lbs. of limestone, 1 can of spar urethane, and 2 tablespoons of salt
• Add limestone to desired lightness
• If working on larger surfaces, you may want to make smaller batches to avoid the mixture clumping, or I found that adding a little water helped avoid a gloppy mixture
• If you do want more white, you can mix in some white paint or go over some bricks with the paint/lime mix for added character and different shades (we learned this on mistake, but it worked out perfectly!)

Before:

  After:

 

And with the beautifully stained wood mantle!

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