ORC Spring 2020 – Week 7 -Grout washing our Exterior Brick

We are getting so close to the end of the One Room Challenge and we’re at the point where we are exhausted but have to just keep pushing through. We are going to be working hard to the last second but we made some great progress this week. All the deck boards are in, the pergola is almost finished and our house is painted! I’m saving most of that for the big reveal next week, so this week I wanted to share how we grout washed our exterior brick.

In my week 4 post, I shared our exterior paint plans. This was a last-minute addition to our one room challenge which has definitely made it feel like 5 room challenge! But when I had the opportunity to work with Valspar paint, I had to take it and update it all since we were already adding a deck and pergola.

As a reminder here is our exterior before.

We ended up having to replace the top fascia boards and the box trim under the window, since they were rotted, which again added more to our to-do list, but having those fresh boards up there already made it look better.

I had planned to just limewash the brick, but it has very deep mortar joints and I didn’t like the look of that so I knew I would be filling the joints with grout first. But once I started doing that I realized I could skip a step and just use the grout and apply a “grout-wash” to the bricks.

First I filled an icing piping bag with the grout. (There are official mortar piping bags you can buy but I had a bunch of these in the kitchen and it worked the same.)

I worked in small sections, basically, when I used up the grout in my piping bag I would move on to step two. Which is to wet a tiling sponge and smear the grout all around. You want to make sure it gets in all the cracks and joints just like if you were grouting tile.

This step took some experimenting to get the coverage that I wanted. I would smear the grout a bit, then, wet the sponge again and rework areas until they looked right. After smearing each section I would also step back a few feet and see if there were any areas I wanted to add more grout to or some that I wanted to remove it more. The process is very much like grouting tile except you don’t have clean it up like tile and you can leave a lot of the extra grout for that Limewashed effect.

If it was nice historic brick I would have kept it but it was faux 80’s brick so I knew it had to change. I love the soft texture it adds to the exterior now. (The middle section below is still drying but it will lighten up like the one on the right.)

If you have ugly faux brick I definitely recommend this process or some form of limewashing! It makes the brick feel modern and adds a beautiful visual texture.

Now, go check everyone else’s updates on the ORC Blog page!