Old Red Brick with Dodgy Paint?

Hi there
We recently bought an old red brick house. We are currently waiting for a decision on planning permission and reckon (all going well) it will be at least 4 months before a builder is on site.. We are trying to do as much as possible now in terms of stripping out the house. The house is an old red brick which has been painted red with white paint in the grouting (why did people do that?!?) Is it possible for us to clear this off ourselves? Is there some kind of a blaster which takes this off which we could hire for a weekend? Or is this something a professional should do and best left till the end of the job? We are not doing anything to the front off the house apart from replacing PVC windows...
Thanks!

Re: Old Red Brick with Dodgy Paint??

Hi Kerbs ,


Depending on the area painted over , if its relatively small (say the front bottom half of the house) you could buy nitromors....its an industrial strenght paint remover....just slap it on with a brush on each brick and leave for an hour an the scrape off with a wire brush......other than that your best bet is a sand blaster......

I've just completed this very same job on my 1949 end of terrace house. I used a product called NB40 or 60 I think from Strippers Paint Removers in the UK. Look them up - its excellent stuff, as is their Klingstrip for removing paint from wood, far superior to nitromors.

I brushed on the NB40, next day wet it with warm water, scrubbed hard with wire brush, connected my pressure washer to hot tap, and cleaned with warm water. Did this twice and it brought the bricks back to their original colour, and got the black paint of the pointing, though I needed to repoint anyways.

hey there - thanks for that.. the house is not v.big so think we will give that a shot. Anything we can do ourselves and not pay the builders for is a blessing!!

Hi kerbs,

The discussion that took place some time ago about ordering this paint remover is in this key post from post 17 onwards.

Sueellen.