What is the best way to get paint off of exterior brick?
Question:I have spray paint and oil based paint on my brick work left behind by the former owners of my house.
Answers:
See this:
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Hello...oh, this is a troublesome problem for me because of the type of brick my home is made of. It depends if you have soft-fired brick or high temp fired brick. The soft fired is at a low temp and is very porous; it disintegrates with moisture and can be easily gouged. Soft fired is typical of older homes.
If you have a modern brick that is hard and cleaves rather than gouges, you can try power washing it or, my prefered, 'sand'-blasting it. However, rather than blasting it with sand, you might want to try something less abrasive, such as rice, cherry pits or walnut hulls.
Oh brother,...I'm removing the paint from a 130 year house right now (the whole house) and it's soft brick. Now, I'm going to repaint it, so i don't know if this is going to be of any help to you or not. Anyway, there's probably 8 to 10 coats of paint on this thing and the last 5 were slopped on without any attempt to remove the previous coats. I hit it with paint remover first but, it was way too slow, like less than 10 sq. ft. a day. I am now using an angle grinder with a wire brush on it.
I know this sounds fairly brutal but, it WORKS. With the wire brush, I'm getting down to the very first layer of paint and not scarring the old, very soft, brick at all. The detail of the brick and mortar lines are all coming back and, with the new layer of paint on them they look a hundred times better than what i started with. Again, i don't know if your case is this extreme but, just in case, i thought I'd ought to chime in with my two cents worth.
Try pressure washing if bricks cant handle the pressure soda blasting done With baking soda is very effective one delicate surfaces
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