White Washed Brick {and a battle}

Something about me saying I was going to try to not spend extra money in the month of September must have made the devil mad, cuz he has been throwing all kinds of stuff my way. Ha!  My friend shared this scripture on instagram this morning and yes, this and so many other truths are what I have been leaning on through this mess.  

You may have seen this picture from last week.

I have never been a fan of painted brick.  I don’t know why, it’s just not my thing. With that said, I do not like the color of the brick on our house.  It has that same orange glow that everything in the house has.  It’s fine outside – I mean I can live with it, we painted the trim in such a way that it seems to tone it down.  But, inside – ick.  I knew I would never paint it, but then over the past year I have seen several white-washed looks floating around.  I was intrigued.  I liked that, depending on how much paint you used, you could still see the brick look.  So, in light of my current circumstances, I decided why not – what else could go wrong- right (never say that by the way ;)).  

I went to the garage and found some leftover white paint I had (the same paint I used in my laundry room), a container, a brush, and a rag.  I decided to try a really small amount of paint at first, knowing I could always make it darker, but never lighter.  So I used a ratio of 1 part paint to 3 parts water.  Not enough paint. So I ended up with a 50/50 ratio, and that got me the look that I was after.  I have seen white washes that are really close to just painting, but I really just wanted a cloudy top coat to tone down the color of the brick.  Here are some pictures to see how it went.  

Here’s a side-by-side before and after.  Just a subtle change, but really exactly what I wanted.  No more orange glow and it seems to make the corner feel a little big bigger.  

Curious to see how this room looks now? Check out this post

and this post!