#and definitely going to start repainting a bookcase i have!

[autoneurotic]

look at my cute studio. very pleased with the hanging zines! won’t lose any pieces now and they won’t get all marked up

[thedaveandkimmershow]

We started moving rocks again last night.

And then this morning.

It wasn't just rocks, although we have plenty of those. This time it was concrete wall blocks we use to edge our gardens. Only...

We're moving our gardens.

Actually, what's going on here is that Kimmer's landscaping our property. Technically speaking, she's re-landscaping our property. I don't know how many times this makes it. I just know it's more than twice since we bought the house before Linzy was born.

So.

Not so often as to be traumatizing. But often enough that I'm like—

Here we go again.

For starters that means moving heavy concrete blocks from one part of the yard... to the other. Just as, over a month ago, I moved, not boulders but they sure look like boulders, from one part of the yard to another.

Kimmer's transforming our front yard into a space we'll actually use as opposed to a space that's simply out front of our house. She's also transforming it in some ways according to what we already know about how we use and would like to use this space out front of our house.

First up, of course, is weeding. Because there's weeds everywhere and Kimmer set about removing them as she listened to audio books on Audible. Which might sound like hard work to you (and certianly to me)... but it's a kind of therapy for her. Always has been.

My efforts today focused mainly on giving the space out back of our yard a major and super involved haircut. It was quite simply overgrown back there. Seven inches of grass on one half of the yard, more than a foot on the other, and not an insignificant amount shooting out from between the pavers of our patio that stretches from one end of our property to the other. I moved every piece of furniture, every planter and bucket, every thing off the patio and weed whacked anything that wasn't cement.

Now...

The reason I even mention something so mundane, so domestic as weed whacking is because that generic act of weeding is the central theme of our move back to the house. We're weeding everything. We're getting rid of everything. We're taking every space we own whether outdoors or indoors and making sure there's less in it. Even the bookcases that're gonna be hung in the closet of my edit suite are now gonna be a pair of simple bookshelves because it's less wood, a lower profile of stuff, and therefore takes up less space. And we're all about that right now. Taking up less space.

It's kind of a minimalist approach. It's very much turning into its own aesthetic. And it feels like that old Da Vinci quote where we're not actually sculpting our home but simply removing everything that isn't part of it. Leaving ..

Our home.

In other news, we're three weeks into the house so far. The family room is still an unexpected hit as we use it for both family activities and work activities. At some point we'll also use it for exercise activities more regularly. We do have two exercise machines in there, though, so the entire room's solidly good to go. We definitely got high marks on the room when a friend stopped by Friday night. One of his first remarks as Kimmer showed him around was what a great room that turned out to be. 😁😁😁

Down on the other end of the house, we picked up the solution to our bed conundrum last Sunday. The problem was there was nowhere next to us to put things, especially drink mugs. Everything was inevitably behind us. And we're no longer the twisty human beings we used to be, so...

So Kimmer found a storage headboard that takes up less room between the wall and our bed. She also sliced the middle out of a second hand table we bought a week or so before, leaving two narrow, but deep, end tables three drawers tall that she then painted white just as she repainted the storage headboard that same white. She set it all up a day or so later and it totally works. No more awkward twisting around for our nightly teas or morning coffees and lattes.

Our friend I mentioned earlier, by the way, showed up to our place on an electric bike. Ours was the first trip he took with it and it was both unexpected and sweet to see him when we spotted him coming down the street. He's a dear friend of ours, also an extraordinary, Da Vinci-like carpenter and electrician, a human being with incredible creative and strategic ability as well as breathtaking troubleshooting skills.

His expertise is written all over our house.

And the reason I mention him stopping by is that "stopping by" like that wasn't a thing when we lived in our apartment. Most of that had to do with the pandemic, of course. A lot of that, too, was related to the fact that all our friends live up here... not down where Linzy was literally the only one who could drop by because she lived in the neighborhood.

Okay last thing:

Popcorn.

We have this old, steel popcorn popper with a hand crank we used to use when we lived at the house before. But for some reason, we never used it at the apartment. So it became this thing we used to do, popping popcorn that way, and then enough time passed that I simply forgot we used to use it until Kimmer pulled it out last night and cranked out some of the most delicious popcorn we've had since, well, we used to live here. The trick, by the way, is a little salt, a bit of olive oil, and that hand crank.

Anyway, I get that all sounds domestic. I do. What's really happening, though, is a kind of reclaiming. Like the Dutch reclaiming land from the North Sea, we're both reclaiming habits from our past...

And a home from out of the midst of so many things, weeds included, that no longer belong here.

[dammitadolfnomorecake]

Once Bitten, Twice Stupid prt 158 prt 1

158

Lance’s scan went well. Their twins were doing well, better than Lance felt at any rate. He and Keith had gone shopping. Keith had sprung it on him after the scan results were positive. Confused as to where his boyfriend was taking him, as it clearly wasn’t back to the apartment or Garrison, Lance had started crying when Keith’s surprise became clear. He’d been worrying himself over what had been said in the toilets. Worrying that Keith would work it out, and no longer love him. Neither of them had been “gay” before meeting each other. Lance wasn’t sure what to describe his sexuality as. Men were hot. Women were hot. He could appreciate both, but Keith was a whole next level batting out of his league kind of deal. Keith might be tall, broad, grizzled and sexy as all heck, but he was so much more than that. He was funny. He was smart, funny, coffee addicted, and there wasn’t anything he’d change about his boyfriend.

Heading into the store, Lance knew it took a lot of courage on Keith’s behalf. The store’s car park had been pretty full, large signs in the windows declared some kind of sale. Keith grabbed a shopping cart, anything he liked his boyfriend wanted to buy. Lance felt the exact same way... Even if he was the more practical one of the two. The vampire only had a couple of rules for their shopping trip; practicality came first and they didn’t need super duper fancy when something simple would do the job.

Steered away from the cute onesies, Lance once again was clueless. There was so much to look at, his hands resting on his baby bump, trying to take everything in. That’s when he realised. Keith was leading him to maternity clothes and he could have kissed his boyfriend for it. There was absolutely no way to hide his bump now. The clothes Keith had bought him only just covering the roundness of his stomach. Tears rolled down his face, excited as heck for new clothes that’d fit his changing body. Keith misinterpreting his tears, trying to stutter out asking what was wrong as Lance tried to reassure him they were happy tears.

Though feeling self conscious as he looked at all the flowery and flowing materials, Keith urged him to pick whatever he wanted. He’d always dressed himself somewhat neatly, much preferring the fashion of now to short short and jeans that suffocated his testicles. He couldn’t help but blush hard at putting in a couple of maternity bra’s. He didn’t exactly have breasts, but he didn’t not at the same time. Keith seemed to love them. Especially during sex where he’d hold Lance’s breasts instead of his hips. His boyfriend was definitely more okay with the changes in Lance’s body than Lance was, but that was okay because it meant Keith still accepted him for him and not his body.

The next wave of tears hit hard as they looked at cots. Lance wanted a room the twins could grow in. Some place filled with love and comfort, he was hit with wondering if Krolia wanted the same when she was pregnant with Keith. She’d probably had so many hopes and dreams, without the thought of having to abandon him in the future. Noticing Keith staring down into the crib, he moved to wrap his arms around his boyfriend’s waist. This had to be hard for Keith. To be wondering the same thing. To have spent years thinking his mother didn’t love him. Nuzzling into Keith, Keith turned his face to kiss Lance on the forehead. The gesture soft and sweet, making Lance smile with the amount of love he felt for his boyfriend. He loved Keith, and he loved being with him, but lately he’d found himself really needing time with his Gremlin. Pidge might not be overly maternal, yet she gave him a level of comfort that he longed for. That his sister would come to his house threw things out of whack. Pidge was more of a sister to him than his own sisters.

“You worried about being a daddy?”

Nosing Keith’s cheek, Lance knew he was. Keith had been acting a little strange in the way he was ignoring Krolia. Shiro mentioned Krolia called because Keith wasn’t picking up his phone. Lance left to wonder if it was because he wanted to go back to the house or if Keith had other things on his mind. He wanted to be able to chalk it all down to this planned surprise but that didn’t feel entirely right. The only logical conclusion he had was that Keith was internally panicking over being a daddy all over again

“I don’t know if I can be a good dad. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to choose a cot... like... what if I choose wrong? What if they die because I chose wrong?”

That was being a tad dramatic

“All of them have to conform to a certain safety standard these days. I was looking online a little and you can get cots that convert to toddler beds”

“That sounds like a smart idea. I’m sorry, this was my idea but I don’t even know where to start”

“We start with the basics. Shit, shower and sleep. So, cots, a baby bath, and I don’t think we really need a change table”

Keith snorted with laughter

“I don’t think you have to be so blunt”

“I’m just saying, they’re like the real basics we need”

“We haven’t even picked a theme or a colour for the nursery”

“Maybe we can choose it together based on the furniture? The only thing I was going to keep in there was the chest of drawers”

That made sense, right? Like repainting a wall to highlight a certain picture... Then again, decoration wasn’t Keith’s strong point. Red on black, with more black was how his boyfriend rolled

“But... like... bedding? How do we pick bedding?”

As long as it wasn’t black, Lance wasn’t fussy

“That’s easy. If it’s soft and nice it comes home with us”

“I don’t think it works that way”

“It does now. You’re going to be the greatest daddy to our twins. I know you don’t believe it, but I firmly do”

“I feel... out of my depth”

If only Keith could peek inside his mind and see how unalone he was with those thoughts. Keith was blissfully ignorant to his internal struggles with his boyfriend being labeled by an idiot. Shiro had been right. Each time he’d started to feel shitty about Keith being slandered, all he had to do was think about everything good inside Keith and how that idiot had no clue about his boyfriend

“So do I. I had a bit of practice growing up, before Luis became a dick. We’ll work everything out together”

And they did. Keith found a convertible bed he like while Lance found a change table he absolutely loved. There were drawers. Drawers and an inbuilt bin. The second he saw it he knew it was a game changer. Fluttering his eyelashes at his boyfriend, Keith snatched up to of the paper slips for the cots before jogging over to him. Lance hadn’t meant to wander away. The change table completely to blame as it lured him over.

Looking the piece of furniture up and down, Keith frowned at him

“I thought you didn’t want a change table”

That frown wasn’t bring down Lance’s excitement. If anything he was more determined to show Keith how fucking cool it was

“I didn’t know I needed a change table. Look at this beast! Look at it. There’s drawers. Drawers! They didn’t have this stuff when I was growing up and it has a bin!”

“What do we need a bin for?”

“Nappies, obviously! And wipes... Babe, I don’t think I’ve ever fallen in love with a piece of furniture so fast, and it’s white so it matches the beds”

Only in colour. The style was more curved, but with the right accessories it’d blend right in. Plus, he needed it. He needed it more than he needed blood. Every molecule of his being seemed to be vibrating with excitement over how much of game changer this really was. He loved his old drawer, but this... It was more a case of “Drawers? What drawers?”

Keith sighed at him in an overly exaggerated way, he was winning. Keith was caving

“If that’s what you want...”

Lance nearly squealed, yet as much as he wanted it... needed it, he wasn’t going to disregard Keith’s opinion

“Only if it’s what you want”

“They said online something about “Push Presents”. Do you want a push present?”

Lance knew he’d done plenty of research, and he knew Keith was the same, yet it still thrilled him Keith was researching all things baby. He didn’t really need a push present. Their twins were enough. Them alive and breathing, that was it

“I don’t need a push present, but I think I need this change table. No. I know we need this... I mean, look how practical it is! Babe, look at it!”

Keith laughed softly, Lance stepping back so his boyfriend could inspect the change table as he gestured wildly towards it. Keith’s eyes widening at the amount of space in the drawers as he checked the depth of the top two

“Seeeeeee. Think of all the supplies we could fit in there”

“We have to buy the supplies first”

Pffft. At this stage Lance was happy enough to buy it simply to look at it

“Good thing we’re at a baby super store...”

Keith tried to hide his smile, coughing to clear his throat, before giving up with a shake of his

“Alright. We’re doing it. Cross change table off the list. We’re getting one of these bad boys... Holy heck, the bin bit has a latch. Kosmo’s going to have a hard time getting past that”

Keith was hooked! Lance knew it! That squeal escaping out his nose, Keith raising an eyebrow at the weird sound. Pfft. Keith already knew he was dating a weirdo, a very excited weirdo

“I know! Whoever designed this needs a medal. So if we get this, then the bedding, and the supplies we need most when I pop, that’s like almost everything”

If he popped tomorrow they’d be basically prepared. Not that he intended to. He wanted these two to bake as a long as they could

“What else do you want to get?”

“A rug, and a bookcase... oh, and a chair. I definitely want a chair in there for nursing”

For nursing and “sleeping” in on sleepless nights. In his mind he could see Keith sitting in the chair, reading their twins their bedtime stories, or holding one of their twins for a bottle feed

“That sounds smart. Okay. Done. Where do we buy a chair from?”

Lance smiled at his boyfriend as Keith looked over the display of cots and bedding. With how large the store was, he wouldn’t be surprised if they did have rugs, bookcases and chairs, probably with a high price tag...

“From a furniture store. They’re not hugely necessary items, and we’re not going to have room in the back of the my baby once we get the boxes for the cots and the change table”

“Do you think they’ll deliver?”

The cots, or the chair? Either way, Garrison was outside of almost every free delivery zone. He knew from experience, but happy to spend the money if he really needed to

“If you want to pay a $250 delivery fee”

“Fuck that. I could probably ask Hunk if we can use his dad’s Ute”

Lance loved Hunk’s dad. He was as easy going as Hunk, but he didn’t want to ask for a favour without being there in person

“Or we could save it for the next time we’re in Platt, it’s only two weeks, and by then we should have an idea of colours to match with”

“That’s like super smart. Okay, so we need bedding next?”

“Mattresses too...”

“They don’t come with a mattress?”

“Some do, some don’t. I want to try and find one with a removable cover”

“They have removable covers?”

Keith seemed extremely shocked by this. Lance could only hang his head. It was like the first time Keith discovered the waterproof mattress protector on their bed. He’d been so confused until Lance had gently pointed out wet spots happened and he’d rather them not happen to his mattress. That and when Blue brought him presents he didn’t want squashed entrails on his mattress either.

Kissing Keith’s cheek, Lance then nodded

“Yep. Trust me, you’ll thank me the first time you have to clean shart sheets”

“Our twins are going to be perfect”

“Babies poop, babe. Fact of life”

“But they’re only small”

Boy was Keith in for a surprise. Good thing Lance hadn’t mentioned projectile vomiting and sometimes stuff came out both ends at once

“And sometimes they make a huge mess. I’ll save the first one just for you”

Wrinkling his nose, Keith looked as if the spell of excitement over their twins had been broken

“You don’t have to”

“Nope. You insisted”

“Well don’t let me do it again”

“I make no promises”

*

Garrison. Keith was grateful to be home again. Lance had been texting on the drive home, Keith finding out who when Hunk and Pidge had been waiting for them at the house. Volunteering Hunk to help unload, Lance was whisked away by Pidge. Keith somewhat glad Lance hadn’t insisted on helping with the heavy lifting. His boyfriend had loudly proclaimed he was beached this morning, while laying on his back with his belly out. The scan might have gone well, but Coran had done a lot of “ahhing” and “ohhhhing” and telling Lance to get plenty of rest, while not explaining anything to the pair of them. Though Keith had planned to take Lance shopping, he’d upped the schedule to distract his boyfriend from whatever Coran could possibly mean.

Opening up the back of the Bronco, Hunk’s eyes widened at the game of Tetris Keith had played in the back to fit everything in. Each cot had two boxes, the change table had three, then there were two mattresses, three tins of paint, a fly screen door Keith had no idea what for, plus the baby clothes, bedding, Lance’s clothes, the small amount of shopping they’d done for home, as well as nappies and wipes. Both of them had spent a fair chunk today, without buying the chair, bookcase, or rug Lance wanted for the room. Keith understood how Hunk was speechless, the hunter also somewhat speechless at the pile of shopping to be brought in and sorted.

Explaining the pile, Keith pointed as he talked

“The big boxes are for the nursery and the bags need to go to into the living room. Lance wants to wash everything before he puts things away. If it’s food, well, you know...”

Hunk cutting him off as he eyed the very top of the pile

“Is that a door?”

Yep. The stupid thing kept sliding forward to smack him in the back of the head every damn time he braked. Lance wouldn’t explain, saying it’d become obvious if he was patient

“Lance wanted it. He got distracted at the hardware store”

“I’m not going to ask...”

“You know he probably heard you ask”

Hunk groaned

“That’s not fair, man. And how dare you guys decide you’re staying in Platt without telling us about your date”

Lance had mentioned in passing that he missed his Gremlin. Unloading the bronco would leave Pidge and Lance to have some sibling time together. Keith knew he’d been thinking a lot about Lance’s sister showing up, which meant Lance had to be thinking about it at least twice as much

“I bet that’s what Lance is telling Pidge all about. Seeing you haven’t been to Platt, Lance brought home papers for Shay to sign. Basically the usual “she’s not going to tell anyone he’s pregnant””

“That’s usual?”

Okay, maybe not the usual... Lance said he’d sit down with Shay and explain things, and that the conversation was well over due. Hunk had dropped it on them so semi casually that old Keith would have flipped

“Nope. If you want to grab that top box, I’ll grab the one next to it”

Hunk looked the pile of shopping up and down

“That door’s gotta come out first. Did you guys just buy everything?”

“Not quite everything. Lance did get caught up looking at kitchen sinks”

Hunk didn’t laugh. Keith secretly quite proud of the joke. Lance would have laughed. He would have teased him about about understanding universal jokes better than he had when they met. Maybe even made a joke about “Who needs a kitchen sink when I can tap you?”. He missed Lance.

Talking as they unloaded, Keith found out he’d missed nothing much happening at the garage, other than Hunk’s dad looking for him when he hadn’t come in. Spending time with Hunk was pretty cool. Hunk knew enough to be a hell of a mechanic if he’d wanted to, so it’d been easy to discuss bike specs with him over Keith’s baby. The new exhaust pipe he’d ordered hadn’t arrived yet, the shipment delayed, but from the way Hunk filled him in he could tell the big guy had missed having him around. It was nice to feel missed, even if it twinged at him that Matt had gotten the job he’d hoped to apply for. Lance was right, he was made for being hands on.

There was a certain feeling of accomplishment that came with fixing each part of his bike up. According to Coran’s schedule he’d be starting back as a hunter in March. Coran hoped to have everything in place for summoning the demon out of Curtis by then, then he’d be a trio with Shiro and Curtis, instead of simply partners with his brother. Lance had asked Coran about what went into summoning out a demon, and Keith promptly became lost when it came to things that needed to be brewed.

He’d tried to pay attention for Shiro’s sake since it was his future brother-in-law’s life at stake, yet Lance seemed to have a better grip on how it’d all go down. He’d meant to ask Shiro and Curtis to come stay a few days before the summoning, yet forgot thanks to “baby brain”. The store had been pretty intimidating. As was the three missed calls from Krolia on his phone. Keith knew he couldn’t keep ignoring Krolia, but Krolia seemed to think he wanted to rush into proposing to Lance, leaving him agitated that she was meddling again.

Speaking of proposing, he’d also had a kind of crazy idea. Miriam’s rings were where they should be, but part of him wished he’d had them for when the time felt right to propose to his boyfriend. While Lance had slept, Keith had worked. He’d found every photo he had of Miriam, cropping things down until he had a clear mental picture of how her ring had been designed. His intention now was to save back up and find a jeweller in Platt able to recreate Miriam’s wedding ring, with his own tiny twist in it. Instead of three diamonds, he wanted 5 stones. 2 amethysts and two sapphires, with a diamond in the middle. Lance would realise the significance the moment he saw the ring. Or, at least, that was Keith’s hope. Never had anyone managed to reassure him about the unique colouration of his eyes like Lance did. Amethyst the closest stone he was probably going to be able to get, while he hoped he’d be able to find sapphires close to Lance’s own eye colour.

“Earth to Keith, you in there, Bud?”

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Keith nodded as he straightened up. Having Hunk cut down on the number of trips up and down the stairs, but damn if he didn’t feel weaker than he had been

“Sorry, I was off thinking about the future”

“Was it interesting?”

“Mildly. What’s up?”

“I asked if I should just leave the bag of nappies up here? I grabbed them with the second mattress”

“Oh, yeah. That’d be awesome. You’ve got to see the change table when it’s set up. Lance is love with it. This thing is awesome”

Hunk chuckled at him

“I thought Lance was adamant about not having one. He told me he didn’t want one when we asked”

All their friends had asked what they wanted or needed. Being their firstborns, Keith and Lance both wanted to prove that they could support their growing family without the need of gifting. Keith particularly felt the need to overcompensate as he’d never had any real family experience until Shiro

“He didn’t until today. You should have seen the look on his face. He seemed ready to commit murder if he didn’t get the change table”

“I’m sure he wasn’t that bad”

Maybe not, but I’d been love at first sight for his boyfriend. Lance thinking he’d been turning on the charm to sway Keith, the joke on his boyfriend as Keith was very readily swayed by his lover

“He would have carried the one from the store home if he had to”

Hunk laughed openly as they both imagined that. Lance really would have. He’d probably even say it wasn’t at all heavy

“Is it bad I can see that? That’s bad, isn’t it?”

Keith snorted, smile wide

“Not really. Lance can be very determined”

“Man, don’t even go there. He’s almost as stubborn as you are about not letting us know about this date of yours. I know you took photos. Lance said there were photos”

“Only on my phone. We’re lucky half the zoo didn’t come home with us. Did you know he has no problem with snakes? He’s jus like “Yep, that’s a bit snake. I’m gonna touch it””

“I don’t need to know what you two get up to in private”

Keith was stunned. Slack jaw stunned. Their little Hunk was going there

“Oh man, don’t tell me I broke you”

“I’m not broken. Lance is going to lecture me about corrupting you with all the time we’ve spent together lately”

“You’ll have to talk to Shay about that one. No offence, dude, but she’s the one”

“None taken. If this is everything, we can collapse now, right?”

“Sounds good to me. I’ve got some ice tea in the fridge”

Keith hadn’t been an “ice tea person” until he’d met Lance. Lance barely made ice tea, but Hunk... Hunk was their culinary god. Not that he’d tell Lance. Lance’s cooking was so amazing he was sure he was getting fat. Fat and lazy... He liked being mostly a home husband without the whole constantly fearing for his life. He liked having good people to come back to, no matter how far he want, they always welcomed him back

“Hunk, you are a god... You know this right? I don’t know how I can thank you for everything. We keep up and leaving... but... you guys...”

“Aw, man! Bring it in!”

Hugging Hunk, they both wrinkled their noses at how sweaty they were from lugging everything upstairs

“Dude, we need showers”

That they did. A cold shower would be just the thing to wash away the heat in Keith’s cheeks. He and Hunk had hugged before, but this hug had him feeling a little self conscious. The day had been long, shopping wiped him out much more than than thinking about his dwindling bank account

“You can go first. I should check on Lance”

“I don’t mind if I do. The tea’s in the fridge, all you have to do is pour”

“Thanks... and thanks for helping. Lance probably could have done it all in one trip”

“I don’t know. I think even he might have struggled trying to carry everything”

“Well... maybe. He would have tried though”

“This is true. Okay, I’m gonna hit the shower. Don’t forget the tea”

“As if I could”

Being polite Keith grabbed out the serving tray, glasses, and pitcher of tea before carrying them to the living room. Lance was snoring his head off, laying with his head in Pidge’s lap, Pidge shooting him a worried look

“Keith... I think I broke him. He started crying then fell asleep”

Okay. Lance crying wasn’t that unusual. Keith was still learning that tears didn’t mean sadness. Sometimes they just seemed to happen. Lance had cried on the way home because he’d bitten a hole in the straw of his drink... Still, the tray shook slightly in his hands, Keith forcing himself not to rush to put it down on the coffee table and spill everything as he did.

Spilling the tea slightly, the hunter forced down a breath. Pidge was still staring up at him, her hand on Lance’s hair

“I didn’t mean to make him cry. We were talking and he started crying and I didn’t mean to...”

Keith hoped he hadn’t been making a judgemental expression. Pidge adored Lance, she’d never intentionally make Lance cry

“It’s hormones mostly. Should I be worried about what you were talking about?”

“He asked if his sister had been back, then told me how much he’d missed, started crying and fell asleep...”

“Ah...”

Keith mentally groaned. He was terrible at this “comforting people thing” when it wasn’t Lance

“I didn’t mean to”

“It’s not your fault. We’ve had a pretty long day, and this is Lance, he cried a lot even before he fell pregnant”

Pidge snorted before sobering. Keith tried not feel possessive watching Pidge stroke Lance’s hair

“Yeah... I just... didn’t mean to upset him”

“I doubt it was you. Some stuff happened in Platt... Some wanker hurt him for bumping into him and he realised a few things. Trust me when I say it’s really not thanks to anything you’ve done”

“Thanks, Keith. I love him, you know. And did you just say someone hurt him?!”

Lance whined in his sleep, Pidge clamping her free hand over her mouth as they both watched. When it became clear Lance wasn’t about to wake, she slowly moved her hand down, whisper yelling

“Someone hurt him?! What the hell happened?”

“He had a bit of a panic attack, and the guy didn’t appreciate Lance stumbling into him. He’s okay now, but... Actually, I have something to ask you”

Keith was still on the fence about returning to the house. Lance wanted to go. Keith didn’t want to go. He didn’t want Lance committing that place to memory and his nightmares getting worse

“Oh? Actually, I’ve got something to tell you. Lance fell asleep before I could talk to him about it... well, two somethings... You go first”

Pidge had something to tell him? Why did he get the feel he wasn’t going to be happy? She was smiling, but he knew how sharp her teeth could be behind that smile

“You’ve known Lance longer than I have, and I don’t want to fuck this up”

[geekeryandsentiment]

I remember you telling us, you know quite a bit about all the kiddo’s rooms. Can you describe them for us? And why did Liz wanna rearrange her room? (as mentioned in the silent treatment) Also, You had mentioned chalkboard paint once, and I found that idea so cool😍

Hey there! You send this in about four years ago and I just didn’t have the time to answer when you sent it in and then idk, I just got lazy and let it sit in my inbox for a while...however, here’s your answer, sorry about that. This one is below the cut and I’m warning you it’s loooooong. Sorry lol, I got a lot carried away. I hope it was worth the wait lol. Sorry again.

Before I forget...Lizzie just wanted to rearrange things. Sometimes moving the direction the furniture is facing can help spice things up a bit. If i remember correctly she was 11/12ish during the silent treatment and around that age Arthur pulled out his old desk from storage and put it in her room, so possibly she thought of a better way to rearrange her furniture to put that desk in the place she wanted it? 

Liam’s room is like his happy space. There is no theme or reason to anything. It’s all completely random. He’s still got posters and trinkets from his first year attending school and even before that. Alby’s art is plastered on his walls and he has old birthday cards and little notes that he and Alex used to pass back and forth in lessons tacked up on his walls as well. He has repainted it 4ish times since he was eleven and his parents repainted one of the other rooms (the one that would eventually become Alby’s room) and he decided it looked fun and wanted to try it. One time, when he was sixteen, he endured his room being pink for almost three months over the summer because Elizabeth dared him to do it when he was discussing possible color changes and he didn’t have anything else to do that next day (and has absolutely nothing against the color pink) so decided to take everything off his walls and paint them pink just to show her that he would. His room is currently green and the wall that had chalkboard paint on it is accented a darker brown (the green did NOT properly cover up the chalkboard with only two coats and he didn’t have any more green so he had to improvise). For several years he had a whole wall of chalkboard paint (the around his door) and he and Alex were entertained by that for many many hours in their preteen years. He is the only one of the kiddos to have a TV in his room. He didn’t get it until he was thirteen and he had to practically trade away his soul to convince Waverly to allow it, but he and Alex also had a lot of fun playing video games on that throughout the years. He has Theo’s old room, and Theo is very crafty with his hands. When he was younger he installed bookcases into the same wall his two windows are on, so William has bookcases surrounding his two windows that go from his ceiling to his floor. They are covered in books, some of which he will never read but owns anyway simply because he likes the cover and think they look cool. The other furniture in his room doesn’t match all all. Like at all. For the most part that is because he has broken a lot of the pieces that used to match and instead of doing what Waverly wanted to do and reordering the pieces or even picking something that matches the remaining stuff, Liam just picked out things he liked as replacements, even if they clashed with the other things in his room already.

Alex’s room is a bit more themed and put together, but it’s also always messy. It’s not dirty. It’s regularly cleaned and he makes his bed every morning (and if he dared leave food wrappers or any food in his room Waverly would have his head) but it’s cluttered most of the time. He doesn’t really mind if things are on the floor or if his desk is stacked three feet high with different files and textbooks and Lord knows what else. He knows where everything is. He manages to stay ahead with his schoolwork and keep everything straight, so Arthur and Waverly don’t hound him too often to make sure his room is as neat as they would like. His room is pretty typical. It’s painted a dark, navy blue and he has a whole lot of red (his curtains and bed sheets) and grey (his comforter and bean bag) accents. He does have a giant beanbag in the back corner behind his bed that Alby loves to fall asleep in sometimes, though. His bedroom used to belong to Beatrice when she lived in the palace when Arthur was younger, but her pink walls were painted over when he was about one years old and Arthur and Waverly decided to stick him in the room beside William’s. It’s nothing too fancy. William’s room is definitely far more interesting with the built in bookshelves (and wait until you hear about Lizzie’s room...🤭) but it’s his home. That’s his safe space. When he feels like the whole world is against him, the only place he wants to be besides maybe on his piano bench, is his own bedroom. 

Elizabeth’s room has changed colors a few times throughout the years too, but it’s stayed purple, just different shades. Her room is across the hall from Liam and Alex’s and on the same side of the quarters as the sitting room, meaning her windows overlook the palace gardens. She has a large, three window set up with a small cushioned seating area that extends out from the wall a little bit. When she was younger she had a few cushions and a mattress pad there and her and Alex would have sleepovers in her room all the time. They would look up at the stars and she would try to point out constellations. Now, that mattress pad is used every once in a while for Alby if he wants to spend the night in her room, but more often it’s tucked away and she just uses the area to sit on her laptop or read. In the corner she has a large corner desk with a desktop computer with two monitors. She doesn’t have a TV, and she doesn’t really need one because she has a pretty sweet set up there. Her desk belonged to Arthur when he was younger (no, none of the children are in his old bedroom. Too many unhappy memories. That’s used as a guest bedroom now, and only if there are too many guest to fill up the other two rooms) and still has his initials carved into the corner from when he got bored and engraved them one day when he was about twelve with an old key he found. Her room is more themed than Liam’s, her furniture matches, even Arthur’s desk fits in really well with the other black pieces, but there isn’t really a color scheme or anything. Lizzie doesn’t really care about that. She just fills it with things she likes. Oh, she also has a blacklight in her room and an epic solar system hanging from her ceiling as well as markers that she can draw all over that massive window with. When she was home full time it used to be schedules and count downs until special dates and to do lists. Now it’s not quite as busy as it used to be and more often than not the windows can actually be seen out of because they aren’t covered in marker...but every once in a while she’ll feel a sudden urge to draw on them again and fill them with chemistry or math or biology...or even music. 

Alby’s room is stand alone and surprisingly the farthest away from Arthur and Waverly’s because he was born last. He is on the same side of the hall as Lizzie, but he does not have the room connected to hers. He’s actually one more down. ((Oh, this is actually relevant so let me talk about it for a moment...The room that is connected to Lizzie’s is currently used as a lab or sorts for her. She has all kinds of old technology in it that she tinkers with a lot, it’s pretty empty and none of the others are jealous that she has the extra room or anything. They do call it Lizzie’s “lab” though sometimes, and there is a proper key to it that she has and she regularly locks it when she doesn’t want Alby to go in and touch anything she’s working on.)) His room is still really kid-ish. He has toys and a little chair that hangs from his ceiling that he can sit in when he reads. His room doesn’t have the same bay window that Lizzie’s does. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in his room. He’s almost always in one of his siblings’ rooms or he’s lugged a handful of toys down to the sitting room/Arthur’s study/wherever someone else is to sit and quietly play near them. He doesn’t really like to be alone, and his room reflects that. There isn’t a lot of personalized things in his room, instead he likes to leave an impression on the other rooms of the house (leaving drawings on the walls in Liam’s room, pictures on Lizzie’s windows when she lets him use her markers, and leaving stuffed animals and small toys on the shelf where Alex’s stuffed crocodile spends his lonely days now that he’s a teenager and he doesn’t play with him anymore). No one seems to mind, in fact, William regularly tells him when he’s away at school that he wants a whole new set of pictures hanging in his room for him when he gets home to help keep the baby busy. Alby has his own shelf full of books that has slowly started to overflow as his siblings slowly hand the boy more and more books to read. His favorite toy when he was younger, and to this day, is trains. He looooooves trains. So if his room has any theme in the chaos it’s definitely trains. He has those stickers on his walls of little cartoon trains and he almost always has some giant town built with the little wooden train sets across the back half of his room on the floor. His parents gave up trying to make him clean those up every night a long time ago. Some battles just aren’t worth fighting, especially when one little town of his creation could keep him occupied for days. 

I don’t know if you meant Elaina too but you’re going to get her because I’m on a roll at this point, lol. Elaina’s room is...well kind of boring. And she hasn’t had too much freedom to change anything either which kind of stinks. She has Brielle’s old room and it is exactly how you would expect a princess’s room to look. Light baby pink walls. Her furniture is white. It’s adorable. She HATES it. I mean, I shouldn’t say it like that, it’s her room and she likes it because it’s her space. But she doesn’t like how it looks. She doesn’t really like how it looks like a nursery (because it kind of does) but her parents aren’t really feeling the whole re-painting thing and her furniture belonged to her grandmother and so it’s staying in the family and she can’t get rid of that either. She really loves all three of the English kids’ rooms. They all are a little darker and the paint and the colors are cooler and not as bright and blinding as her pink and white. She is just a touch jealous that despite Arthur and Waverly’s dictaror-ish tendencies, they let their kids decorate their rooms how they want. She’s an artist, as you all know and she loves to sketch and paint and draw. At one point when she was about 11 or 12, I forget exactly but it’s written so perhaps I could share it one day, she used a sketching pencil to draw this really pretty floral design down the side of her nightstand and her parents saw it and lost their shit (old family antiques are not for drawing on, Elaina. You know better!). She hasn’t dared try to do that again, but she’s also always wanted to get all new white furniture and paint over it and cover it in her own drawings. One day she promises herself that she will. In the meantime, she has one single poorly shaded drawing on her nightstand that she managed to convince her parents to let her keep and not erase. 

That was a LOT. However...sprinkled in there is a few really relevant pieces of information. The story arch I am currently working on directly involves some of this information and you know how my brain is...I can’t think of anything without figuring it out for everyone...so you’ll see some of this brought up in the actual story again too, eventually. 

[mirclealignr]

Home?

(Perspective of cecilia)

My Novel - Chapter 2

Any and all feed back welcome <3

A/N: I’d love to know what you think (theories and feedback) about this and whether I should continue with it <3 likes, comments or reblogs or anything really are super appreciated 🤍

Word Count: 1899

My train arrived in the city at around midday. I wasn’t hungry, I’d eaten a little on the journey. And besides, I was so nervous to see Daisy and Albert again that I couldn’t have eaten anything. I barely ate what I bought for myself. I had half of my sandwich and picked at the crisps, the remnants of which were on the seat next to me which hadn’t been booked. I was glad for that, I was very fidgety, and anyone next to me would have become very frustrated with me. After everyone in my coach had stood up and retrieved their luggage, I too did the same. I collected my sandwich and crisps and put them neatly into my bag, careful not to spill any of it. I stood up and walked to the end of the carriage and pulled my two suitcases from the second shelf of the rack. I rolled each of them to the door and set them down on the platform in front of me before stepping onto it myself.

I looked around for Daisy and Albert but I couldn’t find them. No doubt they had managed to get themselves lost. They were both terrible with directions. Nearly five years ago when they were taking me to the train station instead of away from it, we got so lost that I nearly missed my train. I walked to one of the benches lined upon the platform and sat down, pulling my possessions close into me.

I turn to look at the clock, ten minutes has gone by. Perhaps they got the time wrong. I reach into my bag, and pull out my book. I attempt to read it, but none of the words are going in. I’m so nervous. I glance up from my book and see a woman, frantically looking around on the platform. She has shoulder length, golden brown hair, and it’s swaying behind her as she moves. She’s wearing a wonderful dress, it’s vintage, yellow, with a brown belt wrapped around her waist, and a blue denim jacket about her shoulders. It’s Daisy.

I stand up, anxious at what she might think of me. When I was younger, and living with her, my hair was very long and a dark brown, almost black. I had very pale skin and I was very skinny. Now, I had very short, light brown hair. Where I lived in Germany was always very sunny, so I was naturally tanned. I had grown into myself, my hips had broadened and I wasn’t so skinny anymore. I was slender, I had a fit physique. I was wearing a corduroy pink skirt with tights and a white Tee-shirt underneath my oversized leather jacket. We locked eyes, she saw me. She knew it was me. I looked a lot like her now. I looked a lot like my mother.

She rushed over to me, and crashed into my body, wrapping her arms around me. Oh how I have missed daisy. Her embrace was so intense, I thought I might cry, but I held it in. She was crying. She pulled away and took a good long look at me.

“You look so beautiful. You look exactly like your mother,” she says, tears in her eyes.

“Thank you. You look wonderful as well, you haven’t changed,” I say. I’m glad she hasn't changed. She’s still my Daisy. The Daisy I always remembered.

She doesn’t know what to say, I can see it. I don’t know what to do either. But it doesn’t last long, Albert comes running in after her and as soon as he sees me, his eyes widen. He walks over to me, he’s not running but he’s walking at a pace. He stops in front of me and takes me in, and then leans forward with his arms out. I lean into his embrace. Albert has been Daisy’s partner since she was nineteen. They married shortly after I turned eleven, putting them at twenty-one. And here we all are, nearly six years later.

“Hello Albert,” I say, smiling.

“Hello, Cecilia. You look great,” he says to me, patting my shoulder. I nod my head. Daisy begins to babble, all about my old room, the house, the village. I love her voice, I love hearing her talk. I almost forgot how it sounded. The voice in her letters gradually faded into my own. I’ve missed Daisy.

I don’t look out the window much in the car journey. I want to see it all for myself when I walk. I walk a lot, it’s one of my favourite things to do. The scenery in Germany where I lived was wonderful, but it held no memories for me. Walking here, back home, that would be different. Daisy asked me lots of questions about how I had been, what Germany was like and all sorts of extras. I had talked about a lot of it in my letters but I knew it wasn’t the same. So I answered them all. When we arrive at the house, I step out of the car and look at it. It’s the same. Made from stone, it stands tall and proud, the large windows allowing you to see into the wonderful interior. The garden was lovely as well, Daisy must have kept it up. It was a wild garden, tamed to her liking. There were dozens of buttercups and forget-me-nots and little bluebells. It was quite a sight to see. Towards the back she was growing three sunflowers. I always remembered telling her that I wanted sunflowers. I suppose she eventually got around to it. The bay windows were lined with fairy lights and the shutters had been repainted a lovely pale green. My bedroom was in the back of the house, so I couldn’t see whether any of it looked the same. I’m sure it did.

Albert took my suitcases from the back of the car.

“Bloody hell, what have you got in here?” He says, straining to lift them up.

“About the last five years of my life. I couldn’t leave anything behind,” I say. Daisy rushes over in front of me to unlock the door. She opens it and beckons me in. I was right, nothing had changed. It was still all very modern looking. All very sleek. There were photos and paintings on the wall in the landing and the living room. The cream sofa had been kept very clean over the years, as well as their cream chair. The kitchen was bigger than I remembered. The countertops matched the sofas, but the cupboards were a dark brown, contrasting very nicely.

“Are you hungry? No I suppose not. Would you like to see your room? Well I mean nothing has changed,” she gushes.

“Yes, actually I’d love to see my room,” I say. I can remember it as clear as day, but that’s not the same as seeing it. She leads me up the stairs, the wall beside them is filled with photos of her and Albert, me and her friends. And my mother and father. I hesitate next to their photo, but quickly regain my composure and continue up the stairs behind Daisy. She opens the door to my room and waits in the landing.

“I’ll leave you alone for a while, Albert will bring you your things,” she says smiling, and leaves. Just like that. I would imagine that she doesn’t know how to talk to me anymore. Talking to an eleven year old is very different to talking to someone who is nearly seventeen. I’ll admit, I’m not sure how to talk to her either. So, we don’t.

I look at my room. The walls are painted white and filled with posters, art and photos from my eleven year old life. The bed is barely two feet from the ground. I sit on it and it creeks under my body weight. I think a new one is in order. I gaze at my room, all the stickers on the furniture, all the childish books scattered across the room and and on the white bookcase. The little TV with a curved screen. I was not getting rid of that, it looked amazing. My vanity desk, made to look vintage. That would stay too.

Though it was my first day here, and I had only been back in the country a few hours, (including the train journeys) I wanted to clear it out and make it new. I wouldn’t be able to sleep with all these memories starring me in the face and suffocating me. It had to go. I start by ripping the posters of Olly Murs and JLS off of the walls. I hadn’t listened to them in a long time. I much preferred older music, or very unpopular modern music that no one had heard of. The wall stickers had to go too, and all the old art. I leave the pictures of me and my family up, they were staying exactly where they were. I walk up to a chest of drawers and open it. It’s full of all my old clothes. I pick out a few items I want to keep for sentimental reasons, and put the rest of them in a pile. A charity shop could make very good use of them. I walk over to the vanity and get rid of some of the brick-o-brack I had on top of it. In the drawer were old brushes and combs and hair ties. They would probably all go, I had all of that in my suitcase. I gather all my books and go through them. I decide to keep the Harry Potter series and The Lord Of The Rings. The rest would go. I should probably get The Hobbit as well, I’ve never read it.

I’d managed to keep much of my feelings in check since I arrived back at the house. But all that came crumbling down. I sit on my bed looking at old photos of me and my friends. Tears are streaming down my face, remembering them, remembering us and how happy we were. Who would’ve known that it would all come to end, and so soon after many of these photos were taken. There’s one picture of all of us down by the river that we used to go to all the time. It’s heartbreaking. There we all are, Alex, me, David, Evan and Bailey. I run my fingers across the print and linger on the figure of David. Poor poor David.

It was the summer of 2015 when David died. It was right before his twelfth birthday. They said he’d ‘had an accident’, and fallen into the river, banged his head and drowned. But we never went to the river alone. We never did that. We agreed never to do that, it was our place. We would never go alone, especially at night. And we were eleven, the thought of going to the river alone at night scared the living daylights out of us. We tried one summer to sneak out and go, but we got too scared and ended up turning around. We were all grounded for nearly a month. He would never have gone alone. They said the time of death was around midnight. He definitely wasn’t alone.

I wanted to go back. I wanted to see it.

Tag list: @chaotic-fae-queen @teenagereadersciencenerd @reallyreading

[lalainajanes]

Klaroline + they find out dragons exist/aren't extinct when Caroline accidentally finds herself with a pet dragon

More of the mini drabble prompts from a couple weeks ago! I went full on with the magic school thing here. Sorrynotsorry.

Have It All

When Caroline’snewest student, a young boy from a coven in remote part of Sweden that was exhibitingabilities his parent’s didn’t know how to deal with, had shown up with a blueenameled box as a gift Caroline hadn’t been able to turn it down. He’d smiled,sweet and shy, and told her in heavily accented English that he was lookingforward to beginning to learn and left the box on her desk while one of herassistants set out to introduce him to the other kids in his age group.

She’dstudied the box for a minute, held it up to the light to admire the vivid bluesand swirling silvers that decorated it. It had been remarkably heavy, she’dnoted and she’d been searching for a latch when someone had knocked at heroffice door.

Running aschool meant precious little time to kick back and relax, Caroline had found.She was forever on her feet putting out (sometimes literal) fires. She’d setthe box aside once she’d returned to her office, buckled down to do some of herendless piles of paperwork, and forgotten all about it

Until ithad begun to move. On its own.

Now, acouple years ago Caroline might have screamed bloody murder. Her nerves weremade of sterner stuff now that she was often surrounded by tiny people with extreme,sometimes uncontrollable, power at their disposal. She merely pushes back herchair, eyeing the box perched innocently on a bookshelf under the window.

She’d beensubject to a prank or two and while little Valter Andersson didn’t seem the type to attempt to make anentrance but maybe that had been on purpose, an attempt to lull her into afalse sense of security by hiding his true shit disturber nature.

Magical kidswere definitely crafty.

Carolinestretches as she rises, wincing at the faint crack of her spine. She’d beensitting still for way too long, hadn’t even noticed it was dark outside. The girlsusually hustled out of her office for dinner or their bedtime routine at thevery least, but they were taking a long weekend camping trip with Alaric. She’dbeen invited but had turned the invite down. Caroline liked indoor plumbing andmattresses, thank you very much, and had decided to stay behind and take theopportunity to get some work done.

The boxmoves again, a corner edging over the lip of the shelf and Caroline’s stepsquicken, her hands reaching out to nudge it to safety. She’s surprised that it’swarm, almost hot, considering the sun had set hours ago. It also seems to behumming faintly, and Caroline has no doubt that there’s something witch-yhappening.

“Just don’texplode,” she mutters, reaching for it again. She really didn’t want to have torepaint her office or hunt down a new bookcase this weekend. Feeling for a seamshe’s startled when it opens in her hands. She flips the top up higher, herbrows creeping up when she sees a silver egg thing inside.

It has apronounced crack and is moving about in the bed of silky looking fabric it laysin. She leans closed, almost drops the box when the crack widens.

Was that a…snout? Was there something alive inthere?

Cautiously,Caroline reaches in with a fingertip, brushing away a broken bit of shell. Atiny head peeks out, pale blue and scaly, it’s eyes blinking open to peer up ather. “Oh my god,” Caroline breathes. It makes a noise, a tiny adorable chirp-ything, and its head nudges her fingertip. “Hi,” she manages softly, petting itshead gently, doing her very best notto freak out.

She’d neverhad a pet and lizards gave her the heebie jeebies. Still, no need to scare thepoor little thing. It squeaks again, giving a shudder, breaking though the restof the shell.

At whichpoint she almost drops the box because the lizard had freaking wings.

She’s immediatelystartled again, this time by a knock on her office door and Caroline whirls,setting the box gently on her desk where it’ll be safer than in her shakyhands. She hadn’t even heard anyone approach, so engrossed was she in the boxand its contents.

The knockcomes again, and she calls permission to enter. Klaus’ face is creased withconcern when he enters, his eyes darting about the room suspiciously. “What’swrong?” he asks, clipped and forceful.

Carolinebarely notices Kol wandering in after him even though such a sight usuallywould have gotten an eye roll or twelve. She’d relocated the school to NewOrleans just over six months ago. After a couple years in Mystic Falls Matt wasgetting antsy as they kept expanding, witches from all over sending kids forguidance, werewolves without packs and vampires without sires showing up at theboardinghouse’s door. She’d had to become an expert at deflection, every timeshe ran into one of her old teachers or some of her classmates a comment wasmade about how good she looked and questions about her skincare routine asked.

People wereonly going to buy sunblock and green tea for so long, she’d known.

Klaus hadremained her most generous benefactor, checks popping up regularly no matterhow many times she’d protested it was too much. He’d brushed her concerns asideeasily with jokes, “Nonsense, love. I’ve been meaning to sell that castle forages,” and sincerity, “Only the very best for my child,” and kept the moneyflowing into the school’s accounts.

When she’dbegun to mention packing up and relocating Klaus had pounced on theopportunity. Talked up New Orleans, the history, the abundance of supernaturaltypes who would surely be interested in employment (convincing qualifiedinstructors to move to a town as tiny as Mystic Falls had always been a trialand she often ended up boosting their salaries as an incentive). He’d convincedher to visit, to check out the city.

And, damnhim, Klaus had her totally pegged. Caroline had loved New Orleans from that first evening in the quarter, thesounds of jazz music and boisterous laughter bouncing between the stonebuildings as she walked by Klaus’ side.

She’d beensold even before he’d steered her towards the beignets.

She’dexpected him to pick up where he’d left off years ago in Mystic Falls, tossingbreath stealing romantic gestures her way in an effort to woo her. She’d evenbeen willing to let him.

In theyears since Stefan had died she’d a brief relationship or two, nothing all thatserious because Caroline had found she kind of liked being single. It was niceto be able to do what she wanted, to be a little selfish with her time andenergy, to not be weighed down by the never ending boyfriend woes that hadplagued her since high school. She’d long since accepted that she’d never beStefan’s first choice and she’d made her peace with it, and with how he’d chosento die. She’d fervently wished she’d had a little more time with him, a littlemore happiness, but in the end perhaps it had been better that they’d never hadthe life she’d planned.

Gettingover a lifetime with him would have been so much harder.

In makingthe decision to move to New Orleans she’d known she’d likely have to reevaluateher commitment to her relationship status. Klaus had never been shy aboutletting her know his intentions, that he was still vying to be her last love.He flirted, and charmed, and he’d opened up in the letters they sent back andforth, revealed his own brush with heartbreak, until Caroline truly thought ofhim as her friend.

When she’dbegun packing she’d done so with nervous excitement, thinking of the new chaptershe was starting, one that was going to be filled with new adventures of the personalvariety, not just the professional.

Imagine hersurprise to find that Klaus seemed determined to hold back. Oh, she knew he wasinterested, could see it in his eyes, the rigid way he often held himself awayfrom her. The first time she’d scored an invite to a Mikaelson family dinner(courtesy of Hayley of all people)she’d watched, wide eyed, her neck swiveling like a tennis spectator as thesiblings had sniped and parried over endless courses of delicious food. Thingshad begun to get heated when dessert had been served and Freya had hustled thetwins and Hope to the kitchen, promising ice cream with sprinkles with theircake.

Caroline’sbrand new dress had gotten bloodied not ninety seconds later when Rebekah hadflung a dainty silver fork into Kol’s carotid artery. Things had been a blurafter that, of china smashing and wood splintering. She’d backed away from thetable but Klaus had intercepted her, ushering her down a hallway as the soundsof the chaos in the dining room had grown fainter. He’d produced ahandkerchief, leaned in to dab at the blood staining her shoulder. He’d beenrueful, intent on his work, “Sorry about them, sweetheart. All that time incoffins left Bekah and Kol a little deaf to social niceties. Or at least that’swhat they’ll claim later as they refuse to assist in cleaning up theirdestruction.”

She’dhuffed a laugh, leaned her head back against the wall to give him more room, “Goodthing you’re probably immune to guilt trips, huh?”

She’d stiffenedwhen she’d felt Klaus answering huffof amusement warm against her skin, had been shocked at just how close he was. Hadn’t been surprised bythe ring of gold in his eyes when she’d met them with hers, the way he’d let thecloth drop to stroke her collarbone with his thumb.

She’d beenso ready for him to make a move but he’d straightened, moved far enough away sothat they were no longer touching and seemed to shake himself. “There. Thefabric’s dark enough that the blood’s not noticeable. I’ll make sure you get areplacement. Let’s check on the little ones, hmm? Make sure Freya’s not gone overboardwith the sugar.”

He’d usheredher away, his resting hand on her back with the barest pressure. He’d done thesame sort of thing a million times, backed off whenever a moment got toocharged. Often showed up with other people in tow, Hope or one of his siblings,so that things stayed light and friends. Still, she felt him watching her, contemplativeand eager, like he was waiting.

Carolinewas a smart girl and it hadn’t taken her too long to figure out exactly what hewas waiting for. The ball was firmly in her court this time. She’d have to bethe one to make the next big move.

She wasjust trying to find the right moment.

Klaus iswaiting for her to reply, his hands held at his sides like he’s itching to tearinto something. It takes her a second to puzzle out why. “Oh! No, I’m fine.”She must have sounded strained when she’d told him to come in. “I got a newstudent today and he brought something… weird with him.”

Klausposture eases and he smirks, “I should think that would be the norm at thispoint.”

“Usuallythe weird things aren’t alive,” Caroline says, nodding down at the box on herdesk. Both he and Kol amble over, seemingly curious. “I’m not entirely surewhat it is. I’m gonna have to google and figure out what this thing eats. Itbetter not be bugs.”

Kol’s eyeswiden with something like glee, “Where did you get this? And how much do youwant for it?”

Somethingabout that was a little alarming. “Itwas a gift,” she says slowly. “You’re a big lizard fan?”

He snorts incredulously,“That is not just a lizard, darling. That is a dragon. I told you they existed, Nik. I had a lovely Finnish witch friend inthe 14th century who convinced me but this one daggered me before Icould go investigate.” He reaches out to touch the creature, recoils sharplywhen it sinks its teeth into the pad of his index finger. “Ouch, fuck!” hebites out, shaking his hand.

“Mind thecarpet,” Klaus says mildly, his fingers inching out more cautiously. He waits,his hand hovering over the lizard, sorry dragon,until it seems to get curious, reaching up to sniff his palm. “You never didlearn the value of patience, brother.”

Kol shootshim a glare, his lips tipping up in a mocking smirk. “You can keep yourpatience, Nik. Celibacy is not the life for me.” He favors Caroline with asignificant look, “This one’s been ready and willing for months and you’ve noteven taken a taste. Tsk tsk.”

She itchesto reach out and smack him but instead just lifts her head, refusing to lookaway even though she feels herself blushing. “Is that supposed to convince meto give you my dragon?”

His facefalls, before he attempts a charming grin, “Now, Caroline. Let’s not be hasty.I have plenty of money. Name your price.”

“I have plenty of money,” Klausinterjects. “Which I generously allow you to use.”

Kol’sclearly about to protest but Caroline holds up her hand, “It was a gift anyway.Selling it would be tacky.”

Hisexpression turns cunning, “Perhaps I could borrow it? Once it’s grown, you see.In return I’d be delighted to work some of my contacts, get you all the info onthe care and feeding of dragons that your little perfectionist heart couldpossibly want.”

Sheconsiders the offer, biting her lip. She could use the help but she’s prettysure a dragon’s not something she wants to trust Kol Mikaelson with. She likesNew Orleans as it is and it would be a shame if he reduced it to a burned outhusk attempting to go full Daenerys Targaryen.

Klaus hasgathered the dragon into his palm while she and Kol took part in their stareoff and it seems perfectly content to burrow into the skin left bare by thev-neck of his henley. “Kol will help in any way you need, love. Without strings.”

They sharea series of hard looks before Kol seems to cave, throwing up his hands. Hegrumbles something - Caroline thinks she hears the word whipped - and circlesher desk to throw himself into her chair, head bent over his cell phone.

She leansagainst her desk, watching as Klaus’ fingers stroke gently along the tinydragon’s back. “He’ll need a name,” Klaus notes.

“It’s a he?”Caroline asks dubiously. How would one even checkthat?

“Does thename really need to be gendered?” Klaus asks with a smirk.

Carolinesupposed he had a point. Mythical creatures likely had loftier concerns. “I’dnever hear the end of it if I didn’t let Josie and Lizzie have a say.”

He smiles, “I’msure you’re right. Opinionated little things that they are.”

Carolinetosses him a glare that lacks heat, “Your child isn’t the mellowest either, youknow.”

Klaus seemsunperturbed, “They do come by it honestly.”

“What’sHope up to tonight?”

“She’ll betucked into bed soon, I’d imagine. Elijah’s favorite symphony is playing inChicago and he, Hope and Hayley have an early flight tomorrow. Yours are off inthe wilderness, correct?”

Carolineshifts her weight, suddenly nervous. Back in Mystic Falls she’d never expectedto be casually talking to Klaus about childcare arrangements of all things. Butthis is her life now, and she loves it. Caroline can’t help but think thisweekend might be the opportunity she’s been waiting for. “Do you want to go outfor dinner tomorrow?” she rushes out. “Assuming I can get a dragon sitter.”

Klaus smileis warm, his answer simple, “I thought you’d never ask.”

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The high pH in BioDomus makes it alkaline, which makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze have little to no mold and mildew issues that John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

All of their products are sold concentrated & are completely non-toxic (by contrast, traditional acrylic paints have water already in them, but to increase their shelf life, they have to add more chemicals to stabilize them).

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you can buy it directly from one of their retail locations or call 678-905-3700 to buy it from them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (remember, they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship and completely non-toxic). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant for masonry (it works on brick, stone, natural stucco with no primer, but can also be applied to other surfaces like hardie board with BioGrip Micro primer), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our hardboard siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate was exactly $4,500 (and there might be a travel fee associated with someone coming a long way to do your work – but obviously that changes based on how far they’re coming, where they’re staying, how many people they bring, etc). We paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover, again by our best guess without invoices being here yet, is about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

Update: all of the invoices are now in, and the final total was $7,500. If it’s helpful, Lance said clients should expect to pay $1.50-$2.50 per square foot (depending on your area) to have their brick painted with BioDomus by a good pro painter (who will apply it the right way so it’s warrantied & so it lasts). Labor & materials are included in that per-square-foot price, so you wouldn’t have to buy the paint like we did. Lance also noted that BioDomus technically requires less labor & materials compared to traditional latex & acrylic coating since covers with only 2 coat process (remember how well it covered in one coat?) verses a possible 3 coat process with traditional latex or acrylic paint. That means the price difference between using BioDomus and brands like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore is usually pretty negligible. 

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

P.S. Have you seen our furniture line sneak peek? You can preview every single piece in our upcoming collection (soon to be sold on Wayfair.com and Wayfair.ca) and read all the measurements, etc (here’s everything from the bedroom section, the dining section, and the living section). WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR YOU GUYS TO SEE IT ALL! And you can get on the email list over there to be notified the second it releases on Wayfair ;)

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The high pH in BioDomus makes it alkaline, which makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze have little to no mold and mildew issues that John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

All of their products are sold concentrated & are completely non-toxic (by contrast, traditional acrylic paints have water already in them, but to increase their shelf life, they have to add more chemicals to stabilize them).

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you can buy it directly from one of their retail locations or call 678-905-3700 to buy it from them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (remember, they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship and completely non-toxic). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant for masonry (it works on brick, stone, natural stucco with no primer, but can also be applied to other surfaces like hardie board with BioGrip Micro primer), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our hardboard siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate was exactly $4,500 (and there might be a travel fee associated with someone coming a long way to do your work – but obviously that changes based on how far they’re coming, where they’re staying, how many people they bring, etc). We paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover, again by our best guess without invoices being here yet, is about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

Update: all of the invoices are now in, and the final total was $7,500. If it’s helpful, Lance said clients should expect to pay $1.50-$2.00 per square foot to have their brick painted with Biodomus by a good pro painter (who will apply it the right way so it’s warrantied & so it lasts). Labor & materials are included in that per-square-foot price, so you wouldn’t have to buy the paint like we did. Lance also noted that Biodomus technically requires less labor & materials compared to traditional latex & acrylic coating since covers with only 2 coat process (remember how well it covered in one coat?) verses a possible 3 coat process with traditional latex or acrylic paint. That means the price difference between using Biodomus and brands like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore is usually pretty negligible. 

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

P.S. Have you seen our furniture line sneak peek? You can preview every single piece in our upcoming collection (soon to be sold on Wayfair.com and Wayfair.ca) and read all the measurements, etc (here’s everything from the bedroom section, the dining section, and the living section). WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR YOU GUYS TO SEE IT ALL! And you can get on the email list over there to be notified the second it releases on Wayfair ;)

The post Painting Our Brick House White! appeared first on Young House Love.

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The high pH in BioDomus makes it alkaline, which makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze have little to no mold and mildew issues that John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

All of their products are sold concentrated & are completely non-toxic (by contrast, traditional acrylic paints have water already in them, but to increase their shelf life, they have to add more chemicals to stabilize them).

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you can buy it directly from one of their retail locations or call 678-905-3700 to buy it from them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (remember, they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship and completely non-toxic). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant for masonry (it works on brick, stone, natural stucco with no primer, but can also be applied to other surfaces like hardie board with BioGrip Micro primer), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our hardboard siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate was exactly $4,500 (and there might be a travel fee associated with someone coming a long way to do your work – but obviously that changes based on how far they’re coming, where they’re staying, how many people they bring, etc). We paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover, again by our best guess without invoices being here yet, is about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

Update: all of the invoices are now in, and the final total was $7,500. If it’s helpful, Lance said clients should expect to pay $1.50-$2.00 per square foot to have their brick painted with Biodomus by a good pro painter (who will apply it the right way so it’s warrantied & so it lasts). Labor & materials are included in that per-square-foot price, so you wouldn’t have to buy the paint like we did. Lance also noted that Biodomus technically requires less labor & materials compared to traditional latex & acrylic coating since covers with only 2 coat process (remember how well it covered in one coat?) verses a possible 3 coat process with traditional latex or acrylic paint. That means the price difference between using Biodomus and brands like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore is usually pretty negligible. 

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

P.S. Have you seen our furniture line sneak peek? You can preview every single piece in our upcoming collection (soon to be sold on Wayfair.com and Wayfair.ca) and read all the measurements, etc (here’s everything from the bedroom section, the dining section, and the living section). WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR YOU GUYS TO SEE IT ALL! And you can get on the email list over there to be notified the second it releases on Wayfair ;)

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[billydmacklin]

Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The high pH in BioDomus makes it alkaline, which makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze have little to no mold and mildew issues that John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

All of their products are sold concentrated & are completely non-toxic (by contrast, traditional acrylic paints have water already in them, but to increase their shelf life, they have to add more chemicals to stabilize them).

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you can buy it directly from one of their retail locations or call 678-905-3700 to buy it from them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (remember, they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship and completely non-toxic). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant for masonry (it works on brick, stone, natural stucco with no primer, but can also be applied to other surfaces like hardie board with BioGrip Micro primer), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our hardboard siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate was exactly $4,500 (and there might be a travel fee associated with someone coming a long way to do your work – but obviously that changes based on how far they’re coming, where they’re staying, how many people they bring, etc). We paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover, again by our best guess without invoices being here yet, is about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

Update: all of the invoices are now in, and the final total was $7,500. If it’s helpful, Lance said clients should expect to pay $1.50-$2.00 per square foot to have their brick painted with Biodomus by a good pro painter (who will apply it the right way so it’s warrantied & so it lasts). Labor & materials are included in that per-square-foot price, so you wouldn’t have to buy the paint like we did. Lance also noted that Biodomus technically requires less labor & materials compared to traditional latex & acrylic coating since covers with only 2 coat process (remember how well it covered in one coat?) verses a possible 3 coat process with traditional latex or acrylic paint. That means the price difference between using Biodomus and brands like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore is usually pretty negligible. 

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

P.S. Have you seen our furniture line sneak peek? You can preview every single piece in our upcoming collection (soon to be sold on Wayfair.com and Wayfair.ca) and read all the measurements, etc (here’s everything from the bedroom section, the dining section, and the living section). WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR YOU GUYS TO SEE IT ALL! And you can get on the email list over there to be notified the second it releases on Wayfair ;)

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain or a limewash (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The acidity in the paint makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our paint from BioDomus (you buy it directly through them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance said that although he was willing to travel for our job since BioDomus recommended him, his dream isn’t always to be on the road (he has two young kids) but he especially loves limewashing people’s houses with this other product called Classico, so if that’s a look you’d like, he’d be open to traveling for jobs like that from time to time. Oh and he’s actually creating a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant ONLY for masonry (it works on brick, stone, stucco, etc), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks at BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate broke down to exactly $4,500. We also paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover was about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! If we do end up missing the porch coverage, we can always rebuild something – most likely with a flat roof instead of a pitched one – but for now we’re just marveling in how far it’s come since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big brick tongue for the time being, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

The post Painting Our Brick House White! appeared first on Young House Love.

[evannalily]

https://www.pinterest.com/EvannaLily/pins/

Afternoon everyone and apologies for my absence the last couple of weeks! My head has been so involved with homeware, work and some plans for the blog that I literally haven’t had time to post! But I am back with an update on some of the homeware I have been working on over the last few weeks as my bedroom is (finally) starting to get done! I have had plans for my bedroom (I’m still living at home so its not like I have a whole house to be done!) to be redone for about two years maybe and every year there was something that delayed it but I am slowly starting to get things together. There is still loads that needs doing like the walls need to be repainted and other various things but the furniture plan is slowly coming together. About two weeks ago I went up to Dublin and had a look in Ikea and I honestly think thats one of my favourite places now. I was just obsessed with all the displays, the products, the amount of variety in products they have from wardrobes down to dining glassware. I went up to Ikea to buy a double bed and I left with a double bed, a mattress, a chest of drawers and a desk. I have listed my purchased furniture below here with all the links and they are all in the MALM collection! I would show you photos from my room but I don’t want to post anything until the room is completely finished with the walls repainted and I have all the furniture and decor I have planned!

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/storage-furniture/chest-of-drawers/malm-chest-of-4-drawers-white-art-00214553/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/beds/double-king-size-beds/malm-bed-frame-high-white-luröy-spr-29006978/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/desks/desk-computer-desks/malm-desk-white-art-60214159/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/mattresses/mattresses-toppers/hyllestad-pocket-sprung-mattress-medium-firm-white-art-30258753/

As I have mentioned before in previous homeware posts I have loads of ideas and plans for my future home from a dining room layout, furniture for bedrooms, even the type of kettle I want (I know I sound a little mad for a twenty one year old right now) but I definitely am a planner of like visuals. From visual merchandise displays at work for handbags, my own bedroom layout, my outfits from day to day etc so I am definitely like a very visual person so I have this idea of what I want in my future home and what I want it to be like even though I am not moving anytime soon! Here is just a selection of some of the things I have spotted from Ikea that I have in my wish list. You can also see all my home decor inspiration over on my Pinterest profile!

Ikea Wishlist

    http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/wardrobes/fitted-wardrobes/pax-wardrobe-white-vikedal-mirror-glass-spr-89127835/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/tables/coffee-side-tables/kvistbro-storage-table-turquoise-art-10322241/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/textiles-rugs/rugs/tejn-rug-white-art-30229077/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/sofas-armchairs/leather-coated-fabric-sofas/klippan-two-seat-sofa-kimstad-white-art-20306293/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/decoration/mirrors/harran-standing-mirror-white-white-art-90215082/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/tables/dining-sets/docksta-svenbertil-table-and-4-chairs-white-birch-spr-99130615/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/decoration/bathroom-mirrors/grua-mirror-black-art-30292021/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/storage-furniture/bookcases/billy-bookcase-white-art-00263850/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/lighting/shades-bases/krusning-pendant-lamp-shade-white-art-00259914/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/storage-furniture/bookcases/finnby-bookcase-black-art-10261129/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/lighting/shades-bases/brunsta-pendant-lamp-shade-black-art-60333063/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/lighting/table-lamps/klabb-table-lamp-off-white-brass-colour-art-90365255/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/kitchen-products/kitchen-shelves/botkyrka-wall-shelf-white-art-40279731/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/wardrobes/fitted-wardrobes/pax-wardrobe-white-tanem-white-spr-09167199/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/tables/bedside-tables/nordli-bedside-table-white-art-40219285/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/storage-furniture/shelving-units-systems/vittsjö-shelving-unit-black-brown-glass-art-20213312/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/textiles-rugs/rugs/lappljung-ruta-rug-low-pile-white-black-art-40260519/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/small-storage-organisers/racks-stands/turbo-clothes-rack-in-outdoor-black-art-40177233/

http://www.ikea.com/ie/en/products/wardrobes/fitted-wardrobes/pax-wardrobe-black-brown-vikedal-mirror-glass-spr-29127777/

So those are a few things that I have seen on the website and also in the Dublin store. The  sheepskin rug is so nice and is such a good size for throwing over a chair, as a mat on the floor or under a desk chair. Its only €25.00 in store too (You can order online but the delivery charge to different counties is different each time but I know that its €84.00 delivery to Kerry). The dining table and chair set I think would be handy for like a dining/living room as a little eating area for people if you have a get together or something. I love the idea of a mirrored wardrobe because I feel like they capture light really well and add more lightness to the room especially if you have limited natural lighting like I do as I only have a ceiling window down one end of my room. Everything else is kind of everyday furniture like bookshelves which can be used as display shelves, a shoe rack or for books, bedside tables or side tables in the living room and everything else you can use anyway that you want.

I will keep you updated on my progress with the room as it goes along but it is going to be slow progress! I will also let you know that I have a few changes planned for the blog so I am working on ideas all the time at the moment and there will be some big changes! The blog is turning four this year and I feel like these changes need to happen now rather than later on down the line which would confuse people so I have lots to do!

Speak to you soon guys!

Ever Yours

Lily

xx

New Homeware : Ikea Furniture Afternoon everyone and apologies for my absence the last couple of weeks! My head has been so involved with homeware, work and some plans for the blog that I literally haven't had time to post!

[truereviewpage]

Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The high pH in BioDomus makes it alkaline, which makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze have little to no mold and mildew issues that John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

All of their products are sold concentrated & are completely non-toxic (by contrast, traditional acrylic paints have water already in them, but to increase their shelf life, they have to add more chemicals to stabilize them).

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you can buy it directly from one of their retail locations or call 678-905-3700 to buy it from them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (remember, they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship and completely non-toxic). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant for masonry (it works on brick, stone, natural stucco with no primer, but can also be applied to other surfaces like hardie board with BioGrip Micro primer), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our hardboard siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate was exactly $4,500 (and there might be a travel fee associated with someone coming a long way to do your work – but obviously that changes based on how far they’re coming, where they’re staying, how many people they bring, etc). We paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover, again by our best guess without invoices being here yet, is about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

Update: all of the invoices are now in, and the final total was $7,500. If it’s helpful, Lance said clients should expect to pay $1.50-$2.00 per square foot to have their brick painted with Biodomus by a good pro painter (who will apply it the right way so it’s warrantied & so it lasts). Labor & materials are included in that per-square-foot price, so you wouldn’t have to buy the paint like we did. Lance also noted that Biodomus technically requires less labor & materials compared to traditional latex & acrylic coating since covers with only 2 coat process (remember how well it covered in one coat?) verses a possible 3 coat process with traditional latex or acrylic paint. That means the price difference between using Biodomus and brands like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore is usually pretty negligible. 

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

P.S. Have you seen our furniture line sneak peek? You can preview every single piece in our upcoming collection (soon to be sold on Wayfair.com and Wayfair.ca) and read all the measurements, etc (here’s everything from the bedroom section, the dining section, and the living section). WE ARE SO EXCITED FOR YOU GUYS TO SEE IT ALL! And you can get on the email list over there to be notified the second it releases on Wayfair ;)

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Painting Our Brick House White! published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[billydmacklin]

Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain or a limewash (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The acidity in the paint makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you buy it online), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant ONLY for masonry (it works on brick, stone, stucco, etc), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate broke down to exactly $4,500. We also paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover was about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! It has definitely come a long way since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. At first we debated leaving the steps unpainted but the dark beige mortar clashed so badly with the brick house, so we knew we needed a new plan. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big clashing brick tongue in the front, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain or a limewash (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The acidity in the paint makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

The reason it has such an insanely long warranty (and is guaranteed to never chip or peel) is because it’s just as breathable as brick. Our painter said “it’s literally like painting brick with brick.” Isn’t that crazy and so cool?!

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our BioDomus paint (you buy it online), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance was so sweet to travel to do our painting job since the folks who sell BioDomus recommended him, but he mainly travels all over the US for his antique limewash applications (using this other product called Classico – you can see those finishes and more on his IG account). So if that’s a look you’d like, he can definitely help you out. Oh and he’s working on a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant ONLY for masonry (it works on brick, stone, stucco, etc), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks who sell BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate broke down to exactly $4,500. We also paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover was about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! If we do end up missing the porch coverage, we can always rebuild something – most likely with a flat roof instead of a pitched one – but for now we’re just marveling in how far it’s come since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big brick tongue for the time being, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

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Painting Our Brick House White!

The weather hasn’t been perfect for photos and our landscaping isn’t looking it’s finest at the moment, but I couldn’t give two flying squirrels because I’M SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT OUR PAINTED BRICK HOUSE THAT I LITERALLY CANNOT EVEN. I am unable to even. And I’m a 36 year old suburban mom, so that’s saying something.

Our house is so heartbreakingly beautiful I literally would not be surprised if it started glimmering in the sun like Edward the vampire from Twilight. GO WITH ME HERE, THIS POST IS GONNA HAVE A LOT OF CAPS LOCK. You have been warned.

Today we’re gonna break it all down – what type of paint we used, why we chose it, how the process went, how much it cost, all that good stuff. And I’ll try to go easy on the exclamation points. No promises, though!!!!!!!!!!

Why Paint Our Brick?

The short answer is that we wanted to. This is our third brick house and I’ve daydreamed about painting ALL of them at some point, so this is basically a 12+ year fantasy that has finally been realized. John has been interested in the idea, but he is so dang practical. So his concerns about maintenance or it showing green mildew and stuff like that have always convinced him that it was a bad idea. But after discussing it on our podcast this summer, a lot of our listeners soothed our fears (we heard from dozens of people who have lived in a painted brick house for 10+ years with zero brick maintenance) and then we found a product that gave us the confidence to go full steam ahead. More on that in a minute.

This house, of all of our brick houses, felt like it was the perfect candidate for a painted exterior. We’ve always loved how stately it feels from the curb, and the way it’s situated at the end of the street and framed by large trees just felt like it was poised for greatness. It was also built in the early 80’s, so it wasn’t lovely historic brick that we’d be painting over… just maroon-ish craggy brick with beige uneven mortar. So we had a lot fewer qualms about painting that – as long as it wouldn’t end up being this super annoying thing we had to maintain. Here’s a more detailed shot of our brick so you can see what I mean about the craggy texture and the maroon coloring.

See how the white painted test swatch immediately feels less ragged looking and all of that uneven beige mortar is neutralized? As soon as we saw that test swatch we were like: YES. THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.

And the good news is that we are not town pariahs for this choice. Ha! Richmond actually has TONS of painted brick houses that are 100+ years old, especially in the more historic areas closer to downtown (like The Fan and The Museum District in Richmond City). So it’s not like all of the “real” gracious and historic homes here are unpainted brick. It’s actually a super normal thing to have painted brick, even in the protected historic areas.

Our neighborhood also has some of these newer 70’s/80’s brick houses that have been painted – but none of them are on our street. In fact, 5 of the 6 houses closest to ours are all unpainted brick (the 6th is siding)… so that also made us feel like painting ours was a great way to break up all the dark brick that’s clustered on this end of the street and add some nice variety.

That photo above is the most recent “before” that we have. John took it back in September, but A LOT has happened over the last five years to get us to that point. The photo below is what the house looked like when we first laid eyes on it. Well, “squinted at it through the shadows” is a more accurate description:

In addition to clearing some trees in the front (both for aesthetic reasons and to solve/prevent some of the moisture & rot issues the house had when we bought it) we also got a new roof, had the exterior trim & siding painted, painted the front door and garage doors, graded & seeded the entire yard, replaced the windows, added landscape lighting, and took various stabs at landscaping. And that’s just what we did to the front!

So as dramatic as the painting transformation was last week – it took a while to get to the point where painting our brick would pay off like it did thanks to all of that stuff that also came before it.

And even though our backyard is still in progress, the difference back there is almost more shocking in some ways.

In addition to new roof, new windows, and fresh paint – we also removed the rotting deck (ugh it was so much maintenance, and it blocked us off from the yard in an annoying way) and added the gravel patio, which is just temporary (we’d love a stone patio down the line) . We also opened up the musty carpeted sunroom to make it a covered porch with a nice cross-breeze and two fans overhead. This “in progress” photo from last year as the deck was coming down is the best photo we could find from the same angle:

And now it looks like this! I could SQUEAL WITH GLEE FOR HOURS about how the white paint helped to unify all of the different surfaces (like the big section of siding above the garage, the large meter box on the back, and even the various stove vents and dryer vents). I never realized how choppy and busy the back of the house looked before – so this photo is like a breath of fresh air. I still have so many plans for back here, but this one big paint update feels like we’ve come such a long way! Future plans: along with longing for a stone patio where the pea gravel is eventually – we’d love big window boxes under the windows above that area to unify them since that one has super chunky molding where we raised the window during our kitchen remodel. I’m also going to paint the two doors along the back of the house the same color as the new front door I think. The list goes on…

What Color & Product We Used

I could look at before & afters all day (there are more of those at the end!) but we wanted to answer your burning questions. First and foremost, the paint we used is a product called BioDomus by a company called Romabio and we can’t recommend it highly enough. None of this post is sponsored or anything (we paid for the paint, the labor, all of it!) so I’m just gonna say that up front because I’m about to rave about this paint and it might just sound like an infomercial. It is THAT GOOD. So here we go.

My research (and a lot of you) kept pointing me in the direction of BioDomus and we can totally see why. The main thing is that it’s a MINERAL paint that’s made specifically for brick, stone, stucco, etc – and not a traditional LATEX paint. Latex paints seal brick which can trap moisture and cause damage, but this mineral paint lets the brick breath like it needs to. It’s essentially more like a stain or a limewash (hooray for durability and better performance!) but it has an opaque painted looking finish, which is the look we wanted.

It has a ton of other cool things that make it amazing for this type of application and these factors all helped give us (aka: John The Skeptic) the confidence to move forward with the project:

The acidity in the paint makes it naturally mold-resistant, meaning we should get LESS of that green haze John has been pressure-washing off of the house each year.

It CAN be pressure-washed, although the painter advised us to use low pressure – just like you would on any other painted surface

It has a 20-year warranty, meaning we shouldn’t have to repaint for at least a couple of decades (!!) – word on the street is that it often lasts for 30+ years which amazes us to no end

And – here’s my new favorite feature – it has a FLAT FINISH, which is SO RIDICULOUSLY LUXE LOOKING. I’m about to start calling my house Chateau Sherry or Villa Blanca like a freaking housewife you guys. THAT IS MY LIFE NOW.

I didn’t really appreciate that last feature until it started to go up, but I think the fact that it’s super matte (instead of glossy/shiny) is what helps give it that historic looking high-end feel, like something straight outta Europe. Do I live in France now? Should I create a two story bookcase a la Belle in Beauty & The Beast? Should John start a beret collection? Maybe. The funny thing is that we worried that painting our house would make it look newer and less historic and classic, but I’m telling you this flat soft white paint makes it feel SO MUCH MORE HISTORIC AND CLASSIC to us! It’s kind of insane.

BioDomus does come in a small set of existing colors, but they can also color match it to any color you want by Benjamin Moore or Sherwin Williams – which is what we did. Just like any color-matching that happens across paint brands, it’s not 100% exact, so you DEFINITELY want to order some test pots before committing to an entire house. We knew we wanted something that read as a pure but soft white (not too beige or gray – and not too blinding and stark or cool) and we also wanted it to work with our existing white trim since all of our new windows have vinyl wrapped sills that wouldn’t be getting repainted.

After Googling / Pinteresting a bunch of white exterior colors and consulting with some friends with white houses, we got little BioDomus test pots that were color-matched to these four colors: Sherwin William’s Moderne White (top right), Benjamin Moore’s Swiss Coffee (middle right), Sherwin William’s Alabaster (bottom right) and Benjamin Moore’s Stonington Gray (that’s that left swatch). Our winner ended up being right at the top: Moderne White by Sherwin Williams.

It’s a bit warmer/muddier than a stark white, so we knew it’d look great and not be too blinding – and we tested it in a few other spots right next to the window trim to make sure they looked good together. I had the goal not to settle until I found something that truly felt like a soft warm white color, and it’s such a great one. Couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. This photo is probably the most accurate to the true color in person:

Or maybe this one:

How To Paint Your Brick House

As you know, we hired out this project but that does not mean you can’t DIY yours – especially if you live in a one story house! The paint itself is pretty straightforward to apply, but our challenge was the size of our house – specifically the height. We have a two story home with a full third floor attic and a chimney that extends almost another full story beyond that, so it took a 45′ lift to reach a lot of the brick. We also thought it would be prudent to have a pro apply ours so we could study exactly how it was done and tell all of you guys the right way to do it so you’d have long-lasting results and nobody would have a peeling or bubbling house after all that work (can you imagine?!). And the good news is that it isn’t even that complicated. YOU CAN TOTALLY DIY THIS  – especially if you’ve got a less-tall home or are doing a smaller brick project. Completely doable.

As for how we found our pro painter if you’re looking to hire it out, when we bought our paint from BioDomus (you buy it directly through them), we asked who they thought would be a good person to hire to apply it, and they tossed out a guy named Lance with experience with the product who is based in Kentucky just as a suggestion. Even though they said any local painter should be able to follow directions and apply the product correctly without much issue, when we heard about this painting specialist who had experience with BioDomus already, we thought it sounded like a good idea to learn from him and make sure our paint went on correctly so we have that awesome warranty to lean on and we don’t worry about teaching you guys the wrong way to apply it or some other NIGHTMARE like that. Cut to us all waking up after two weeks and our houses are all purple or something. And Lance was great! Here he is below, just doing his thang and making all of my dreams come true (you can follow him on IG here).

Lance said that although he was willing to travel for our job since BioDomus recommended him, his dream isn’t always to be on the road (he has two young kids) but he especially loves limewashing people’s houses with this other product called Classico, so if that’s a look you’d like, he’d be open to traveling for jobs like that from time to time. Oh and he’s actually creating a video about how to D.I.Y the same BioDomus process that he used on our house – just for anyone who wants to see it in more detail. Isn’t that nice?! So we’ll update this post with that once it’s complete. But in the meantime, we’ll break down the basic steps for applying the BioDomus product:

1. Prep Your House

Like any paint job, you’ll make your life easier if you take time to prep first. For our project it included steps like:

Moving outdoor furniture and decor out of the way

Removing shutters and shutter hardware

Taping and covering all of the windows, lights, etc.

Pressure washing any grimy areas

Note on that last part that you don’t need to pressure wash every inch of your brick before painting it. Lance recommended going over any areas that seemed to have dirt or mildew build-up, but other than that you can apply the paint directly without further prep. Aka, no primer either!

They also did not tape off or cover surround areas like landscaping or roofing. They just tossed down canvas drop cloths as they went and held up small pieces of cardboard to act as spray shields whenever they got close to an area that needed protecting as they went.

2. Mix, Spray, and Backroll Your First Coat

I say “mix” first because BioDomus needs to be diluted slightly with water (they send it concentrated so it’s less expensive to ship). You can read the exact dilution measurement on the package, but roughly speaking it comes in a 4-gallon bucket and you dilute it to become a standard 5 gallons.

The product can be applied with a roller, but Lance recommends spraying it – especially if your brick is craggy. It would take more work to get full coverage into every nook and cranny with a roller, but as long as you’ve got a high-nap roller (like 1 1/4″) it can be done. But again, spraying is MUCH faster. I mean, for reference, it took a crew of three people two full days to spray the first coat on our house. Just imagine if they had been rolling it all. It could have easily taken three times longer. NOTE: They wet down the brick before spraying or rolling – it just helps the product penetrate and soak in – remember it’s more like a stain than a paint. So you’ll want to get all of your brick wet before applying it as you work your way around the house.  

It’s also helpful to backroll your first coat, which means going over the first coat that you have sprayed on with a roller full of more paint, to really smush that extra paint in and even out the coverage. Lance said it’s not necessary, but it makes the second coat much faster to be this thorough from the start. Note: if you aren’t spraying, just rolling two coats on should do the trick.

In the photo below you can see the guy in the lift (Jeremy) spraying and the guy on the ground (Josh) rolling an area that has already been sprayed.

And this photo below of Josh backrolling the garage really shows the difference between just the first spray coat (far right) and how that backrolled area looks a lot more solid and filled in.

3. Caulk Gaps

After the first coat dried, the crew went around and filled any large crags in the brick with caulk. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but even when we painted our brick fireplace inside several years ago we found that it helped to eliminate any deep shadows or dark spots with some caulk. They just used regular indoor/outdoor paintable caulk, so it’s not hard to do – just a little tedious.

4. Spray Your Second Coat

Since they were so thorough on their first coat, and since BioDomus has pretty great coverage, the second coat was able to be sprayed in a single day without any backrolling. That still would’ve taken us like ten days, so it was pretty great to have pros on the job.

5. Paint Any Non-Brick Areas

In addition to the little bit of siding that we have on one side of our house and around the back, we also had random things like our metal electrical meter, the wood door to our crawlspace, and a half dozen other non-brick areas around our house. BioDomus is meant ONLY for masonry (it works on brick, stone, stucco, etc), so be sure to prep and paint those other materials with the proper paint. Lance recommended Benjamin Moore’s Low-Lustre finish for our siding so it’d match the matte look of the bricks and it worked out really nicely.

They were able to get great coverage in one coat of spraying our siding (without priming) but we did prime some other elements – like our meter box and dryer vents – with this all-purpose spray primer.

6. Clean Up and Put Things Back

John The Fact-Checker Of This Post always likes to point out cleanup in any project because it’s so easy to forget that it takes time and energy. You know, removing tape and tarps, putting furniture back, and rehanging shutters if you want to have those back up. Speaking of which – we are NOT planning to rehang our shutters. We were surprised by how much we liked the look of the house without them, and a ton of the painted historic homes that we love most downtown don’t have them either (along with about 1/3 of our own neighborhood) so it just feels good to let the painted brick breathe. We had originally planned to buy new operable shutters like the duplex – but we’re happy to save ourselves the expense and the labor of doing that since we like this look so much.

That’s pretty much it when it comes to the DIY steps for an undertaking like this! Lance made a quick video that shows the process very briefly but he’s planning to create a much more detailed one soon, so we’ll link that how-to video once it’s ready so you can see it in action (in case you want to DIY it – or even just to show your pro if you decide to hire it out). And if you have any questions about the paint, the folks at BioDomus are really responsive and helpful. The guy who created it is named Michael and he is SUPER PASSIONATE about it. He and his wife Leslie run the company, and you know we like a husband and wife team ;)

How Long Did It Take?

Every project and house is different, but I thought it’d be helpful to give you a sense of how long it took for this to happen at our house. It all occurred over the course of five days, but really it was four when you exclude travel.

Day 1: Travel and prep (shutters down, windows taped, start of pressure-washing)

Day 2: Brick on front & chimney side of house get first coat

Day 3: Brick on the back & garage side of house get first coat (also portico demo/rebuilding, but more on that later)

Day 4: Brick on the whole house gets a second coat

Day 5: Siding painted, clean-up, and travel

And again, this was with a professional crew of three painters working from about 8am to 6pm straight every day (except travel days). Lance said typically they’d use scaffolding instead of a lift, but the lift was easier to rent and made them faster. So if your crew uses scaffolding it might add extra time.

How Much Did It Cost?

We haven’t received final invoices yet, but Lance said he typically prices a house of our size around $4,500 – $5,000 in labor. Our labor line item in his estimate broke down to exactly $4,500. We also paid for the paint separately, and our job took 7 four-gallon buckets of BioDomus to complete (although he said our brick was especially thirsty so yours might not need as much, even if it’s the same size!) which cost around $1,700 in materials. And when we add in about $200 in siding paint that we purchased ourselves and provided for Lance, our material cost was around $1,900. So the painting portion of this makeover was about $6,400 total.

Obviously, every project is different and there are lots of factors and circumstances that can affect cost. There are definitely regional price differences too (we asked two of our friends who painted brick houses on the west coast that were smaller than ours and both of them said it was around 10K, which was a lot more than our cost for this project). So just note that this price might be higher or lower than yours, depending on where you live. We went into it fearing it would be closer to 10K, so we were pleasantly surprised, although $6,400 isn’t exactly pennies.

I said “the painting portion of this makeover was $6,400” because thanks to a spontaneous porch makeover we also had a few hours of work from our electrician and about a half a day of work from Sean the Contractor, but we’re still waiting on those invoices. And speaking of the porch makeover…

What’s Next?

We plan to get into this story in more detail on next week’s podcast since it’s quite the rollercoaster (and this post is already long enough) but if you followed along on Instagram last week, you know that in the midst of the painting madness we decided to tackle the porch makeover AT THE SAME TIME. I can’t stress enough that this was NOT the plan going into the week, but I woke up with a wild hair on Tuesday morning and just couldn’t shake the feeling that we should rip the portico off right. that. second.

A few frantic calls to Sean later, and I had somehow convinced him to come to Richmond that afternoon, spend the night at his girlfriend’s house (it helps that she lives in Richmond), and come over bright and early the next day and help us remove the portico (J and I debated doing that ourselves but it was extremely heavy and we worried we’d crack the brick steps or shatter some facade bricks if we tried to muscle it down without help). So less than 24 hours later, by 8:30 am on Wednesday morning, the portico was down, and we were hard at work rebuilding the new surround with Sean…

…which led to a frantic call to our electricians who came and helped us wire up two big 22″ lanterns (that we bought right off the shelves that morning) to cover the two holes in the brick that had been revealed when we removed the portico. You might remember that Halloween was last Wednesday, so it was some sort of Trick Or Treating miracle to have working porch lights and a fully reconstructed door frame that we completed literally minutes before the first little costumed kid ran up our walkway.

Like, this was Tuesday evening:

… and this was 24 hours later:

Our original plan was to rebuild the portico with new chunkier columns, but we’re both really loving the look without a portico – and the door surround that we threw together in about four hours is actually pretty darn good (still needs to be painted white – it’s just primed and caulked but the weather isn’t cooperating). So we’re planning to leave it like this for the time being. The new door color helped a lot too. It’s Benjamin Moore’s Tranquility in a super high gloss finish. They have a new-ish paint line called Grand Entrances, and it’s made especially for front doors that you want to have a mirror-like shine. Tip: sand the heck outta your door so it’s smooth before applying this, because it’ll super amplify any flaw. If you do that, it looks like a million bucks! We love how ours came out!

A bunch of houses in our neighborhood have front stoops without an overhang, and packages get left in plastic bags so they don’t get wet, and we enter and exit exclusively through the garage, so I’m not sure we’ll even miss the portico. There was also a pretty amazing bonus to our foyer from taking down that huge overhang: so much more light shines in through our sidelights now! We keep thinking someone left the light on in there! If we do end up missing the porch coverage, we can always rebuild something – most likely with a flat roof instead of a pitched one – but for now we’re just marveling in how far it’s come since we first bought the house:

Oh but one more “gotta do that” on our ever expanding to-do list (if you give a mouse a cookie… or if you paint your house white…) is to redo the porch floor with some pretty outdoor-friendly tile, much like we did on the back porch. BioDomus isn’t a porch & floor paint, so it’s not really meant to be walked on and we agreed with Lance’s recommendation to go ahead and paint it so the house didn’t have a big brick tongue for the time being, but none of us expect it to hold up longterm.

Our plan is to tile it with something similar to our back porch or maybe even add slate. This photo of Reese Witherspoon showed up in my Instagram feed over the weekend and, well, GOALS. See her painted brick house with those awesome stone steps? Also goals: that dog.

And of course my head is spinning with all sorts of thoughts about our landscaping. The white has really made all of our bushes “pop” and I spent a good hour on Friday trimming and shaving them to try to make the best of what we have, but I feel like I need taller plants on the porch, something big to anchor the left side of the house, and – I dunno – I know our boxwoods are very “English garden” but they’ve never been my favorite because they remind me of those big cement balls in front of Target…

I’m also somewhat obsessed with the idea of replacing that window over the front door (that’s our son’s room) with a larger window so the house feels more balanced and doesn’t have those two blank spaces on either side. This house’s middle window is what I’m thinking about – and it would fit in our son’s room and let in more light, so that might be something we do down the line too.

Oh, and we killed around 75% of our yard (intentionally) after it got overrun with crabgrass this summer, which is why it’s all brown. So hopefully we can reseed and reclaim some green in the spring. At least the fall colors are helping it blend in! Same goes for the back – the grass needs to grow back in, we need to finish that patio (maybe slate like the front steps?), John has to rehang our garden lights, and at some point we need to paint the back doors Tranquility too… and the shed Moderne White to match. The list is long.

But again, we’re trying to just enjoy the amazing progress we’ve had and not get overwhelmed by the tasks that this one very exciting update has added to our to-do list. But wait, have I mentioned that I dream about adding a window to the top left side of our house for balance and to let more light into our master bath/closet? Always scheming… ha!

In summary: I really can’t emphasize enough how happy we are with this change. I caught John outside gazing at the house like a goon the other day and I FREAKING TEARED UP WHEN I PULLED INTO THE DRIVEWAY. I know. It sounds crazy. But the house is just so beautiful it’s what I imagine it feels like if you get the final rose on the Bachelor and actually love that person and they actually love you back and your relationship actually works and you both feel understood and fulfilled. My house has undergone a pretty extreme makeover, and I love it for all the right reasons. AND CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE HOW GOOD IT’S GOING TO LOOK WITH SNOW ALL OVER IT THIS WINTER?! AGHHHHHHHHH.

We talked about some of our nerves on this week’s podcast and John has been anxious about making such a permanent decision for months, so it’s that much more of a GIANT RELIEF to both be so over the moon with the result. Our neighbors love it. Our family loves it. Even a teacher in the preschool carpool line last week said “I saw your house all painted and I’m in LOVE.”

Me too, carpool line friend, me too.

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