Painting the exterior brick walls of our home

Goodbye brick house - hello modern home!

This is what our the bricks of our house looked like when we purchased it.

All I focused on was the exterior bricks and how bad I wanted to render them! We lived in our home for about nine months before a decision about the exterior bricks was made. For those nine months, we spoke about rendering them and what colour we would then paint the render.

In the meantime we removed the daggy external cladding on the rear of the home, replaced it with cement sheeting (blue board) and rendered over the top of it. You can read about the progress of that transformation here, below is a before and after photo. 

After rendering a single story, level, easy to access wall we made the decision that to render our two story, 'hard to access whilst hanging off a ladder on the side of a hill' wall would be hard. A lot harder. We went back to the drawing board and came up with another idea that was not only a lot cheaper, easier and in my opinion more aesthetically pleasing. You guessed it - painting over the external already existing brick. I look back on this decision now and am so happy that this decision was made. In our neighbourhood, it makes our house stand out from all the other rendered homes and being highset on a hill with a lot of street visibility, I think it looks pretty damn good!

So how did we do it? Well there is two ways we could have done it:

1. Using a long pile roller, applying two coats of paint. The long pile roller means that it has essentially more 'fuzz' which will get into all the crevices and give you great coverage. Therefore no undercoat or primer is needed.
2. Using an airless spray gun, applying one coat of primer and two coats of paint. As you are not forcing the paint onto the surface using a long pile roller, a primer is needed to gain full coverage and to ensure that the paint takes to the surface.

We own an airless spray gun, so we went with that option knowing it would provide even paint coverage over the walls and be a lot faster than hand rolling. It also was more practical for us, given the height of the walls we wanted to paint and the accessibility of them. In terms of paint, we used a waterbased Shieldcoat Ultrashield exterior paint in the Colorbond colour 'Jasper'. If you are looking at painting a large scale area, do consider using an airless spray gun, you can hire them for a reasonable price from your local tool/machinery hire outlet.

Here are our progress shots...

Prepping the surrounding areas

Before

Applying the primer base coat

It was at this stage there was no going back!

After

 

 After

Since painting the exterior wall, we have also added in a new tropical garden along wall of our pool area - click here for the pictures.

Thanks so much for stopping by and reading, I would love to know what you think of our newly painted walls! Feel free to leave a comment below :)

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