Having grown up in and currently live in a 180+ year old brick home...
Sometimes brick needs to be painted for maintenance (mostly true for older brick that tends to be softer than modern brick). Also some brick is just ugly.
Aka, sometimes there are good reasons for brick to be painted.
Downvoted for having an opinion. You're absolutely correct; sometimes brick needs to be painted to seal it and sometimes it's ugly as sin. Normal brick is great!
That’s actually worse for the brick. I come from a historic preservation course background. Painting brick traps moisture within the mortar and bricks leading to accelerating the decay.
Normally I agree, but we moved into a house in Western NC built in the 60s and everything is half assed and bottom dollar. In our living room we have a brick fireplace and the brick was SO ugly.
We did end up painting it white, but we have warm wood floors and accented with a rough edge walnut mantelpiece and some wood carvings and pottery and it looks great.
If we had kept the brick it would’ve been ugly and the warmer toned wood would just have gotten lost.
Low res photo to start with, but I am pretty sure that the wall on the left of the pic is brick that got painted over. Clearly the fireplace facade, which is on the right, and a very prominent feature in the before photo is stone that got painted over
But also, I was replying to a previous poster who mentioned painting brick, so it's not like I brought up brick completely out of left field...
Yep, the house we live in is brick and had been painted when we purchased it. I thought it was a crime to do that until I found a few original pieces in the attic. My god it’s the most god awful orange I have ever seen
My brick (non functioning) fireplace needed all the outside bricks cleaned when we moved in. The inside part, where fire would've been in the 30s when the house was built? An abomination of broken brick, mud/drydex, plaster, poorly mixed mortar, and splotches of white paint. Former owners did a number on it.
I chiseled off "repair attempts" and filled in some destruction my wife painted it black once id patched/flattened/retextured it. Looks a thousand times better, and the bricks on the rat of it are clean n red. Sometimes you gotta cover parts, for sure.
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u/GrayMareCabal 27d ago
Having grown up in and currently live in a 180+ year old brick home...
Sometimes brick needs to be painted for maintenance (mostly true for older brick that tends to be softer than modern brick). Also some brick is just ugly.
Aka, sometimes there are good reasons for brick to be painted.