How to White Wash Brick

I don’t normally mind brick…but the brick in our house has a lot of orange in it. After google searching painting brick I came across a website where someone white washed their brick and I loved it. I wish I could remember the site but I can’t find it.
Anyways,
Here is our Before Picture 
Here is during… I was STRESSING at this point!!!! It was WAY, WAY to white for me! But it did look odd because the mantel was not painted yet and the paint was not dry yet!

This is the FINAL picture! 
I took a wet towel with a little bit of soap on it and I wiped off the paint in a few spots so it the brick would look old instead of painted. After the the paint was dry I was very happy with the outcome!
It really has really brightened up the room! And the painted mantel is way better too.
In the picture below it’s how it looked with the Valentines Decor up!

To white wash the brick I wiped it down with a wet towel and water and then I took normal wall paint that I had on hand and I did one part paint mixed with one part water. I simply took a brush and brushed the whole fireplace including the grout. It took two coats of paint. Make sure you let the paint dry in between coats. Because the color changes a lot as it dries and soaks into the brick. Before the second coat dried I rubbed off the edges with a wet towel and soap. 
This projects was one of the easiest things I have done. I had everything on hand which was great, and it only took about 15 minutes to paint each coat and only about an hour for the paint to dry!
What do you think about the after picture?

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14 Comments

  1. I really wish I had of known about this technique 9 years ago when we bought our house and I painted our ridiculously huge brick fireplace! Ours was the same color with all the multi colored bricks. Awful. Now I want to see if I can fudge it to look like that with paint! Hmmmm.

  2. It’s amazing what an incredible difference it made in your room with the mantel painted along with the bricks. Yeahoo, you nailed it gal. Loved your Valentine mantel also. You have a great many outstanding embellishments to adorn your mantel with.
    What fun we have fritzing around with our goodies to make things prettier. I don’t have a mantel but do have a shutter shelf hubs made me and it doesn’t take much to get me to redo it, again and again when ideas hit. Happy WEekend.

  3. I have an antique brick wall in the den, that is actually the back of the living room fireplace – at some point in the 1960’s the carport was made into a den. My husband refinished a cherry mantel and we screwed onto the wall and have a firescreen and an ornate gate in front so it appears to be a fireplace. Sometimes I wish for a white or distressed white brick instead of the old brick color, but have never gotten the courage to whitewash it. I love the way yours turned out. Maybe, just maybe, you have given me the courage to try it.

  4. The whitewashed brick looks great! I’m currently toying with the idea of doing this in our home too, and your post is making me wish we’d already done it. Such a great before and after!

  5. Wow! I keep trying to convince my Mom to white-wash her brick fireplaces, but she just isn’t sure it would be enough of an update. It looks amazing – I love the Valentines decor too!

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