A tan brick two-story in Centerville had good bones and a color the homeowner had stopped loving. They wanted white. Painting brick is a bigger decision than picking a color, so this is how we approached it, what we did, and how the house looks now.
The house before
The brick itself was sound. Nothing here was failing. This was a change the homeowner wanted, not a repair the house needed, and that matters for the next question.
Should you paint brick?
Painting brick is a one-way door. Once a masonry wall is coated, taking it back to bare brick means stripping or blasting, and both can damage the face of the brick. So we say the same thing to every homeowner who asks: be sure you want the look, because you are choosing it for the life of the house.
Two things make it work well. The coating has to let the wall breathe, so moisture that gets into the brick can get back out instead of pushing the paint off from behind. And painted brick becomes a painted surface, which means it gets repainted on a cycle the way siding does. The Brick Industry Association's guidance on painting brick covers the rest, and it is worth ten minutes before you commit.
This homeowner had thought it through and wanted the change. So we got to work.
Prep: wash, mask, prime
Paint only sticks to a clean, dry wall, so the first day on any brick job is not a painting day. We pressure washed the whole exterior and let it dry out.
Then everything that was not getting painted got wrapped: windows, the sliding patio door, the bay window, the outdoor unit, the concrete underfoot. Brick soaks up a lot of paint and throws a fine spray when you roll it, so the masking is not optional. The garage door trim was in scope and was painted along with the walls.
Every wall was primed before it saw color. Primer is what gives the finish something to grab on bare masonry, and skipping it is how painted brick ends up peeling in sheets a few years later.
Rolling it on
Three of us rolled the house. Rolling pushes paint down into the texture of the brick and the mortar joints in a way a sprayer alone does not, and on a house this size it kept the job controllable around the landscaping and the property line.
The single-story wing at the back went first, then the two-story section. Once the primer was on, we rolled the color on in finish coats until the tan stopped showing through at the mortar lines, which is where it hangs on longest.
The result
The white picks up the arched window heads and the depth of the brick coursing, which the tan had been hiding. It reads as a different house from the street, and the garden wall and the garage trim carry the same finish so nothing looks left over from before.
Thinking about your own brick?
If you are weighing painted brick, we will walk the house with you and tell you straight whether it is a good candidate and what it commits you to. If you are already sure, we will wash it, prime it and roll it the way we did on this exterior painting job in Centerville. Our roofing and exteriors page covers the rest of what we do on the outside of a house, and this historic home in Dayton is another paint job we wrote up.
Book a free estimate or call (937) 888-WORK. Let's Build Something Limitless.
