Best Way To Clean Brick?
I'm about to help rehab an old commercial brick building into loft space. Some of the interior walls have old paint on them. I've heard that sandblasting is too hard on the old brick. Anybody have any experience with this?
Be careful. Yes it is pssible to complete sand-blast away the brick. It is also possible to blast with softer things than sand. We once used ground corn-cobs to "sand" blast wooden timbers. The other side effect of sand-blasing brick is that it causes the brick to emit "dust" for years to come. Sometimes this can be reduced by sealing the brick after sand blasting.
Mark2616
Thanks for the info. Where do you get other things ( like ground corn cobbs) in enough quanity to use as a sand blasting material?
I have pressure washed paint off of a old brick foundation and even with this you can harm brick. But it worked well.
Best of Luck
JohnNH
Thanks for the response. My situation is interior rather than exterior. I can't use water. I'd love to hear if anyone has any other ideas about removing paint from brick.
You are going to have to turn to chemical paint strippers.
Two things to remember is the more aggressive the stripper the more non-user friendly it is, the more user friendly the less aggresive it will be.
Look into a product called Citrus Strip available at Ace hardware.
Start talking to some professional painters, the more square footage you are dealing with will also effect what product you should look at.
Generally the chemical strippers are not going to work very well on brick, its too porus and the paint has soaked to far into the brick.
I don't actually know where we go the ground corncobs because I'd hired a sandblasting contractor to do the job. Call up a local one and ask him.
Do not sandblast the paint or use a stripper on it. I suggest either paint over the old paint with kilz to seal the old paint from bleed through. On several loft projects I have paid artist to come in and paint old timey signs on the walls (ex:Coca Cola,Bruton Snuff,Standard Oil,and others). You can use local businesses from that era.