How To Whitewash Brick Walls

Our finished whitewashed walls.

Our large games room, which is really our main living space, has exposed brick walls. In all the years we have been here, I've never really been a fan of this look. I had thought about painting the walls when we moved in but hubby did not like the idea, we had talked about cladding the walls but that was going to cost a lot of money and I didn't see it as a necessary expense.

 I was on Pinterest one day, looking for inspiration and came across a lovely home with white washed exposed brickwork. I showed hubby the images and suggested we could white wash the walls. At this stage he had just repaired the ceiling and I had painted it, so we still had a large tub of ceiling paint left. I figured I would bite the bullet and start with a small area that could be covered up by furniture if we didn't like it.

I started by cleaning the bricks down with a cobweb broom as they were really dusty.

I mixed up a small amount of paint with water in an old bucket. The ratio I used was half paint and half water, then stirred well.

I started painting in the mortar first as this part was quite time consuming, you really need to get the brush into all of the gaps. Then once I did a section of the mortar, I would paint lightly over the entire brick/s.

We have four main walls in the room and I aimed to do one wall every day, or at least every few days when I had spare time. This is a huge room! I had a lot of fun doing this project and it was just so cheap. Painting is quite meditative to me.

A big tub of ceiling paint cost $45 and was enough for me to paint our ceilings and do these walls. Because our bricks are a light colour, I decided to only do one coat. If your bricks are darker I would suggest maybe two coats.

Here you can see the difference in the old brickwork vs whitewashed brick. I love it so much!

I covered up the furniture with old sheets and plastic before painting but wasn't too worried about the carpet as we were getting new flooring soon anyway.

Since doing this project, I have seen white brick wall paper at Masters with quite a high price tag.

So here are the before and after pictures. What a difference a bit of paint can make! 

Before

And after.