| I appreciate all your answers. Now I'm going to give you the full story. Oh and btw, the white paint on the gable is the primer I put on this morning. The yellow is the primer that was on the hardiplank, but it isn't good primer so I'm re-priming it. The brick in the photos I posted has been stained. This is our original brick color.
When we built the garage (you can see a little of the brick on it on the far right of the above photo) and filled in the opening on the house where the garage door was, dh bought the brick. I don't know how many places he went to, but he found the brick he did buy at Acme. It is the right size, and has the same basic colors in it, mostly yellow/tan with some whites, some browns, and some rusty reds. But it is a different type brick. Not only the texture, but it has more whites, the browns are darker, and the reds are more brown than red. This is our original brick
And this is the brick dh bought
They would really stand out if we painted the whole house one color. So when we started this addition, I drove to every brick place within 100 miles and couldn't find ANY brick that matched our original OR the stuff dh bought. Acme no longer carried it, but they did have a yellow/tan brick that was the right size and flat like our original. But it was just yellow/tan. I kept looking and there were no other bricks with a yellow/tan body and brown and red on them. After looking at our original brick, we thought we might be able to stain it to match. This is an original, and it really looks like it was painted with a spray bottle or something. It wasn't, it is some kind of powder that is put on before the bricks are fired, but it LOOKS like paint.
We ordered the yellow/tan brick and when it arrived, dh mixed some masonry stain to match our three other colors. I wanted to sponge it on, and tried one with a sea sponge and it didn't look right at all. Then dh set up a bunch of the bricks and sprayed them with a sprayer. I didn't think they looked like our original, they were too solidly painted, but the color matched and they weren't hideous. Yet. Before the bricklayer got here, we set up three stacks of bricks, a big yellow stack and two smaller stacks for the browns and reds. We set up similar stacks for each side to make it easier for him. It was the same bricklayer who did our garage, so we knew he would do a good job. I had been cleaning the mortar off the old bricks for weeks so there would be enough to do two places where the brick touched the old brick. But for some reason, the bricklayer started laying them with one red, one brown, and one yellow, where the rest of the house had 2 or 3 times as many yellow as the other colors. When he ran out of the red and brown from our stacks, he went around to the other side of the house and took the brick from there. It looked horrible, like a checkerboard. When we noticed what he was doing, we asked him to put more yellow in, like the rest of the house, and we thought we might be able to clean the stain off the brick he had already laid. No such luck. The more I looked at it, the more I hated it. For one thing, even with the color match, it just didn't match our brick. Too new looking. Also, long story short, we ran out of brick and had to buy brick that had a tan body, and it was pretty obvious next to the yellow ones. So this morning, I decided if I couldn't fix the checkerboard by removing the stain, I'd remove it by taking out the rest of the yellows. I used a flat sponge and figured out how to put the stain on the edge and slap it onto the brick to look like our original, and did the whole wall with mostly reds and some browns. I also had an offwhite stain that I used on just a few. And then I slapped a little offwhite on top of all the colored brick to give it some dimension and kind of age it a little. Here's a wide shot of the first photo, showing the rest of the house, and I've sponged on a little stain to some of those brick too.
Now that you know the whole story, you know that I either have to do the rest of the house or paint the whole thing. BTW, the old brick don't take nearly as much work as the new yellow brick since they already have the off white on every brick. The only trick to doing them will be climbing a ladder to do the fireplace (my biggest fear), and a hedge on the far side of the house. So NOW what do you think? |