Painted brick. Long ago, we decided to paint the brick on the majority of our house. This was for a number of reasons. We will end up using over 21,000 bricks, and the ones that Rebecca liked the most were antique bricks. Using bricks that could be painted rather than all antique bricks saved us about $10,000 or $11,000 overall. I’d say that is a pretty significant savings.
When we agreed to that, our expectation was that the bricks to be painted would be very random and ugly. Once they laid them, we saw that they looked pretty decent. Rebecca didn’t care for the color of them, but I happened to like it. Some have even asked me why we would paint those pretty bricks. Well, we had already picked out our colors, or had a general idea of the colors we would go with on most of the exterior of the house .To change that now would not work well. Not at all.
In fact, the painter was there yesterday, priming and then painting all of the eaves. We went with a color called Garret Grey, which on the house, doesn’t look very grey at all. It is in the grey family, but is kind of a bronze color. That works perfectly with the window trim that we picked, bronze. Our window trim is meant to mimic the “oil-rubbed bronze” hardware (hinges, knobs, faucets) throughout the house. Typically, you match the window trim to the eaves of your house. We wanted darker-than-normal eaves, but we didn’t not think it would look very good to go quite that dark. So, we chose a color that complimented it, and boy does it ever! We love how it turned out.
As I alluded in another post, the painter gave us some options for the paint to cover the brick. We didn’t want the true white one…we knew that. And although we liked the green one, we thought it would look TOO green on the whole house. We wanted to stick with more brownish/earth tones, since we will have some stained wood on both the front porch and back porch.
That left us with one optiond…the one in the middle. It was kind of a light tan color, and looked nice with all of the other colors we were considering. Then, the painter threw a wrench in the plans. Yesterday, he painted yet ANOTHER color on the brick for us to decide on. It was in between the true white and the light tan. It was kind of a sandstone or light beige color. It was very nice as well. We went back and forth for a while on this, but ultimately decided that it was too close in color to the ivory buff mortar that was used with the Old Chicago bricks. We wanted the paint to be a little darker than that so the mortar would show a little more.
Ultimately, we chose the one we liked right from the beginning…the one that is a light tan color. We think the maintenance on this color will be a little easier than the true white, as well as the light beige. Many of you liked it the best as well.
By the end of the day, the entire outside of our house should have the paint and stain that it requires. We are SO excited to see how the rest of it turns out!
Until next time…
NOTES ABOUT THE PHOTOS: I tried to isolate the two different colors that we liked with the Old Chicago brick. That way, we could maybe see how well it would coordinate. That’s why you see a couple of those with just one paint sample showing. I even got my builder to try to block the green one out. That was humorous! I know the eaves look super dark, but that is just because they were up against the maroon brick. Once that brick is painted much lighter, the color of the eaves won’t appear so dark.
Dirt To Done 