HOW TO WHITEWASH BRICK ON YOUR OWN: PAINTING THE EXTERIOR OF OUR HOME: FARMHOUSE FIXER UPPER

Hey guys, it's Abby. Welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you how we are lime washing our entire house on a budget and by ourselves. If you are a follower of mine, then you would know that my husband and I bought a 1960s fixer upper about two years ago and on our spare time we enjoy fixing it up, obviously on ourselves and on a budget. So we try to find ways to improve things, fix things that we can afford, but also that we can do ourselves. One of those things that we decided that we wanted to tackle is lime washing the exterior of our house. So the brick on our house right now is very old, very orange, not appealing at all. There's nothing pretty about it. Here are the three reasons why we chose to lime wash our house over painting our house. The first reason being that it is the easiest prep that we can do. And clean up. The wonderful thing about lime wash is that lime wash, um, and this is the brand that we have. Lime wash is water soluble, meaning if you make a mistake, you drip some on the ground, it drips onto the cement below the brick. It gets on your windows, it gets on the trim, it splatters on your door. You can wipe it up with a wash rag with water on it. You can take a water hose and spray it off. You can take a pressure washer and clean it up. If you don't like it, you can immediately pressure wash it off and you have up to five days to do this and change your mind. Paint on the other hand, you all know from experience, especially exterior paint that is a lot thicker. As soon as you drop it, you have seconds to clean it up. And even then it's totally hard to get off. You're not going to get it all off. So you're going to have to buy paint stripper. It's going to be a mess. You have to tape off everything. You have to cover every single window. You have to tape off the trim, tape off the cement. It's so much prep and cleanup with paint. With Lime wash it is not. And I'm going to show you in this video how I didn't tape the cement. I didn't tape the trim. I only taped off, um, covered the new windows where the screens were with trash bag. The second reason is cost. So one gallon of paint is probably around $40. An exterior gallon of paint. If you're choosing to use exterior paint, which is usually recommended 90 bucks a gallon. And that's the average. It's very thick paint and it's going to get clogged in a paint gun unless you buy a very expensive professional paint gun, which is recommended. With Lime wash. It is very thin. Inside the bucket is a chalky consistency of Lime wash and you combine it with water so you can make it as thin or as thick as you want. If you want the brick to look splotchy, kind of like a cottage look where the brick is showing through, make it thinner. If you want it to be solid white, like we're doing, make it thicker. Did not clog in our paint gun. In fact, we did not even buy a paint gun. We bought a, like a spray gun that you can use for stains. It's not even considered a paint gun and we bought it for $99 at home Depot. And the last reason why we chose to do Lime wash over paint is because of the look. Lime wash is made specifically to be absorbed by rock and brick. So the look of it is very chalky and natural versus paint is going to be thicker and look shinier on the brick. But this doesn't, it makes it seem like my brick was actually white whenever it was put on. The only reason it's looks like it's not is because you don't see the cement in between each piece of brick that you would normally see. So far to do this ourselves, we have only spent $99 on a spray gun. We bought a pressure washer about six months ago. Um, but you don't even really need a pressure washer. You could just use a water hose if your brick wasn't dirty. We spent $250 on paint this summer and then I spent another $250 on paint to get more yesterday. So around $600 is the only thing that we've spent to do this ourselves and it has made the world of a difference on our house. I'm telling you it is not even the same house. So if you want to see this process, how we did it, the do's, the don'ts, and the extra tips I'm going to throw in, make sure to keep watching. Give this video a thumbs up if you like it and I will see you at the end of the video. All right. So yesterday we accomplished this side, which is not a lot of brick and we did our backyard. And this section you can tell it kind of has two coats. We were playing around, so we're going to do two coats. But we did all of back here yesterday and all of this back here took us about two hours. And then this morning we got up and did this little section. So time wise this does not take a crazy amount of time. It's really fast if you have a spray gun. If you're doing it by hand, I would section off a lot of time. So today I'm going to be doing the rest of the house. I've got the front and the side of the house that I'm going to do and I'm going to take you along with me. Now I'm going to show you how to mix the lime wash. This is the lime wash that we're using. Bought it off of Home Depot. The only con to this is that you have to order it. So like I'm trying to finish the first coat on my house. I am pretty sure I'm not going to have enough. So my house is going to be half painted for some time, but it's really good quality and I really like it. So this is Blanco white. It's the whitest shade. They have it in a vario white, which I believe is a creamier white. They have a noob gray, which is a grayish white, and then they have a tannish white. We got the white, white. Um, it looks great against just plain white trim. So this is 0.67 gallons or 2.5 liters. So basically you can make this as thin or as thick as you want. Per the instructions, you are supposed to do a one to three fourths ratio to make it thick. You can do a one to one ratio, I think for more of like a normal, um, look or you can even make it thinner if you want to make it splotchy. So this is used also like if you think about like a cottage that maybe has like a red brick coming through the lime wash, that's what this can be used for too. However, we're just making it really thick so that it's a solid white. So what you need if you're going to do the one to three fourths ratio is you need 12 cups of water and I'm putting this entire bucket in it. So I already have 12 cups of water in a five gallon bucket. You need to make sure the bucket's clean. I've been reusing it with the paint, but make sure it's not dirty. I'm going to put this whole entire thing into it. I'm going to scoop it out with a paint stirrer and then I'm going to mix it with a drill. So you can buy like a paint spinner like it's like a stir for paint at home depot. They're very inexpensive. Attach it to your drill and then you can mix it and this just really makes sure there's no clumps and it's really the consistency that you want and it's not going to get clogged in your gut. I am also going to add it's smarter to put this in the bucket and then the water because it doesn't make a big splash whenever you do it. I, however, already put the water in the bucket, so, um, don't do what I'm about to do. Do it the other way. So when you get to the bottom, you can, um, take the leftovers with a cheap dollar general brush. I mean this is from family dollar and you can take the rest of it to paint around like the windows. I'm going to be painting around this. I think it's the gas meter. I don't know. I'm going to be painting around it. The really cool thing about lime wash, probably already mentioned this is that you can wash it off with a rag. So I covered this with a trash bag, but I can also just wipe it off with a wet rag. So I finally ran out of paint in my bucket. So I've literally wiped it clean and the extra I've been doing around our windows. So half of our house is new windows and half is old. The old windows, like I was showing earlier, totally don't even mind them. Like I'm not paying attention to them because they're going to get replaced and I wiped it clean with a rag and it looks fine. But my new windows, I don't want to mess them up and they have screens on the outside. So I am going to tape trash bags over them to paint. I started doing like the trim around the windows. I think I'm still going to continue to do the trim, but whenever you're using the gun, it still gets everywhere because the gun is spraying out air at the same time it's spraying out paint. So it gets everywhere. So I'm going to cover those up and try to finish the section of the wall. So I'm making some progress. I thought I would take a little break. I was going to talk to you about the handheld pressure washer that I've been using in this video. So this is called, Fordless pressure washer. This is by the brand sung life. You can find it on Amazon. I'm going to link it down below. This is really, really a game changer. If you were doing this, it basically has some nozzles that you can change depending on what you're doing. Like if you're washing your car, doing something to the outside of your house, but this has a hose that is attachable and at the bottom there's a filter. So this filter you actually drop in a five gallon bucket full of water and it pushes the water up and through your gun sounds like a handful, but really it's not. I'm just now refilling my bucket and I've done about a fourth of my house. So I just pull it along with me whenever you are using it. It's got a chargeable battery, which is great. I haven't had to charge it one time through all of the painting that we've done on the back and the front, but you push this button in and you push this knob at the same time and the water spits out. So I've been using this to coat the bricks with water because it's important that the brick is wet when you apply the lime wash. And then at the bottom where I'm trying to make the cement and the brick have like a separation, I've been spraying it to get rid of some of the lime wash that is there. So this is really, really good product. I will link it down below for you to check it out yourself. Still not done with the front. It's taken me a long time and I'm about to run out of paint, but this is what I have done so far. So got this side done, finish the window area and I'm about to get started on this wall. Don't think I'll have enough for this or this. So I'm going to have to go back to Home Depot. Okay, so I had to go to the store to buy more and this is what the huge four gallon one looks like. The only downside to this is that you have to, you obviously can't fill the rest of it up with water. So we're having to measure out, what are we doing? Diluting it. I know, but how many cups? 12 cups of this to nine cups of water. It's really, really thick, but I'm going to try to finish this like flower pot area and hopefully the front today, which isn't too much. Um, but tomorrow I'm going to be tackling the side and I am done. My husband helped me finish the backside of our house, but this obviously you can tell we need two coats. There's some splotchy spots, but this took half a day and then I had to be with my kids all day. You know, I couldn't just work all day. And then he took another half day and finished the back and I actually, these are all old windows. Well, these are new, but the old windows, I actually just took the screens off and threw them away and you can tell all of the windows I just wiped clean. Here is the backside that we are done with. Still haven't wiped off those windows, but I just wanted to show you the back part of our house just to show you some of the obstacles. Now, this is the only part that is not done, but we haven't done it yet because of all of this jazz. So if you have any ideas of what would be the easiest way, please comment down below. So I'm going to spray the majority, but I'm thinking we're just going to have to hand paint around a lot of this. It's probably going to be a headache, but so far this only took us about three days for the whole house. All right guys, what do you think? Do you like it as much as I like it? I love it. I think it looks amazing compared to the old orange brick, the black trim that we picked. I'm so thankful. It looks way better than I thought. Um, the door looks fine. I'm just so happy that everything I was choosing actually is looking good. So the next step in our farmhouse fix up series is going to be making shutters yourself. My husband is going to tackle that. He is going to be making cedar shutters and cedar poles for our front porch in our carport. So make sure to look for that next video on the farmhouse fix up series. Thank you for watching and being a wonderful subscriber. We will see you again next time. Bye everybody.