7 Mistakes We Made Limewashing Our Brick Exterior

When we decided to upgrade the look of our brick home’s exterior, we knew two things:

1. We couldn’t afford to buy paint for our whole house
2. We didn’t want to paint our whole house with regular paint (seriously…making sure that thick paint gets in all those nooks and crannies can be a real pain!).

So, we decided to look into Limewash. It was a thinner consistency (translation: no jamming the paintbrush over and over again at those tiny little brick holes, in hopes that the thick paint would eventually cover them up), and it was cheaper.

Well…the homemade version was cheaper.

We quickly realized that we had a lot of research to do if we weren’t going to go the pre-made putty version of limewash (like Romabio). Most of the tutorials I found online showed people applying Romabio limewash to their house, but I was going the SUPER-cheap route: mixing up a $15 bag of hydrated lime (type S), and some water.

The whole process took us about 2 years (and lots of mistakes). We’re pretty sure that, during that time, our house’s exterior brought down the resale value of other houses in the neighborhood…it looked pretty a-w-f-u-l.

But, no more! Watch how we made our own limewash and painted the entire exterior of our brick house for under $30 (ish) dollars. Plus, we’ll take you through the 7 biggest mistakes we made, what we did to fix them!