1983 called. I told them to beat it!
Poor ole girl... she was tired, confused and suffered from resting-b*tch-face. But with a lot of paint and a couple tweaks, we made her current again. This was a super budget-friendly facelift!
YES YOU CAN PAINT BRICK! There are 2 different applications: the all-over solid look and the still-brick with grey mortar look.
I don't love the all over painted brick because it looks cheap... like you painted your brick :S Similar to the look of painted tile. It screams "we couldn't afford new stuff". If you want to do this anyways, the best method is to spray paint the entire area to get into the mortar and all the crevasses.
My preferred method is WAY faster, uses WAY less paint and looks awesome! Simply roll 1 coat of paint over the brick fronts. Leave the mortar and crevasses alone. This way it still looks like real brick with some variations in color and grey cement between each brick.
UNIFY YOUR COLORS. In the (imaginary) Designer handbook 101, you should have 3 colors on the exterior of your house. Less is boring and more is busy (depending on your house you may get away with 4).
Base color. In this case a bright warm grey.
Trim color. On this lady a charcoal grey.
Accent color. The roof was already there in a terracotta orange so we need to roll with that. We painted the stairs and added an arbor to match and bring the color down into the body of the house as well.
Viola! A very inexpensive face-lift!
** One of the biggest mistakes I see homeowners make when tackling a job like this is arguing with the colors they cannot change. On this project, the one thing that we had to work with was the roof... so that is the best place to start! Use colors that compliment (in this case orange). We chose greys that had a slight orange undertone and then brought more terracotta in as features. This will make it all flow together and look very intensional.
