What’s the Big Deal about Painting Brick? 

Here are four reasons why you shouldn’t paint your brick building:

1. You could destroy the brick: Bricks are naturally breathable and porous. Water enters the brick when it rains or snows on the exterior of your building, or when you’re taking a shower on the inside of the building, and eventually evaporates. If brick is painted or sealed, water can get trapped in the brick. When the water freezes, it expands and stresses the brick. This can lead to some serious damage like crumbling, flaking brick faces falling off your building. The only real way to fix bricks in this condition is to carve them out and replace them.

2. You could damage your building’s structural integrity: Painting brick can also impact your building’s structural integrity – and you might not even know it’s happening. The freeze-thaw cycles that damage brick also damage the mortar holding them in place. With the mortar joints hidden beneath the paint, you might not even notice structural issues until they become severe.

3. You could be camouflaging architectural features that make your building special: Many brick buildings showcase masonry details that set them apart, such as decorative bond patterns, dentils, corbelling, dog-toothing, and more. Particularly, historic masonry buildings tend to feature these decorative elements, which give the buildings their historic character. Painting your brick building visually washes out these architectural features, making your walls feel a lot less interesting.

4. It’s hard to go back: Painted brick is not maintenance free. In addition to normal wear from weather and sun exposure, as the brick beneath paint is affected by trapped water, the paint on top chips and flakes away as well. After a few years of maintenance to your painted brick, you might decide you are done with it and want to remove the paint. Easier said than done. In addition to taking time and money, removing paint by sandblasting or chemical treatments can harm the integrity and appearance of the underlying brick. The least harmful way to remove paint from brick is to wait and let it deteriorate naturally or to gently scrape it away by hand.

 Is IT EVER Okay to Paint Brick?

Yes! Some brick buildings were intended to be painted. In the United States, brick buildings constructed before the 1870s were made of a much softer, more porous type of material that needed to be protected from the elements by paint. The paints used on these buildings were natural, mineral-based paints, such as limewash or milk paint, which were breathable. By the end of the nineteenth century, machine-made bricks were the norm, and these new bricks were strong enough to withstand weather by themselves. If your brick building is already painted, repainting or maintaining that paint is an acceptable approach as well. Removing the paint “naturally” can take an impractical amount of time, and removing paint by other means, such as sandblasting, can itself damage the underlying brick.

Yes! There are several good options you can use to put a mural on your unpainted brick building without painting directly on the surface of the brick. These alternative surfaces can be painted elsewhere, like in the comfort of an artist’s studio, then the mural can be attached to the building like a giant painting on a wall. The sealants used on murals, which can themselves cause damage to brick, can be applied to the mural “off-site” as well to ensure the mural stays vibrant and stands the test of time.