Here’s what I have to fix under that stupid red paint

Quick progress update. I’m still plugging away at the paint removal. We’re getting there.

Now let’s look at the condition of the facade. This weekend I used the scary caustic stripper again and got MOST of the caked in white paint out of the marble. Some small dots remain. I could do it again to get every trace, but this stuff is messy, dangerous, and needs to be neutralized by washing the house with acid afterwards, so maybe I won’t. And for some reason, the all the marble from the first floor lintels up has this rough sugary texture and dingy grey staining.

It’s a completely different color than the marble from the first floor sills down.

Though that marble isn’t perfect either. The foundation has some spalls, the water damaged area by the front door is deteriorating, and there are Portland cement patches in it. Plus the brick in this area is deteriorating from water damage and has crude pointing jobs that have to be gouged out.

I knew that the caustic stripper worked well on the thick paint caked into the sugary marble, but I also wanted to test it on the pollution stains and the even older painted-on white “mortar” lines that I found under the red paint. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on those.

And there are more flaws, some of which bother me more than others. The red paint is still stuck in some of the mortar joints. I’m willing to let this go because the mortar is about the same color and it’s mostly high up where you can’t see.

Then we have other damage: bits of mortar that have fallen out. In some places this exposed another layer of mortar recessed slightly with a convex profile – I guess this lower layer is the original mortar and most of what’s exposed is an early repointing job?

There are lots of holes drilled all over for awnings, cable TV, and the totally rigged installation of an electrical outlet in my bedroom. The 2 bricks that spalled off near the middle of this photo – I did that trying to pull a nail. Then I left all the other nails in place until I figure out what to do about them.

This isn’t even a complete list of every single thing that’s wrong with my facade, but you get the idea. My goals are going to be to continue stripping the red latex paint, clean off enough of the pollution stains that the brick and marble colors are somewhat consistent, spot repair the pointing, and do something to repair or stabilize damaged spots on the brick. Pre-existing damage on parts of my facade leave it vulnerable to weather away further. I’ve been looking at dirty corrugated plastic instead of the sky from my windows for 5 years because I didn’t know what to do about this.

There are products to treat this called consolidants that basically soak in and glue loose particles back together. There are water repellant sealers that are supposed to prevent liquid water soaking IN while still allowing vapors to migrate OUT. These might be a good idea as long as they breathe as well as the manufacturers say they do. And that’s a big if and it makes me very uncomfortable to think that the only way to find out might be to put it on and see 20 years later if I destroyed the house or not. I might even be able to repair the damaged bricks, which is intriguing. But my real priority is just to prevent the damage from getting worse. Hopefully I’ll figure out what I’m doing before the paint stripping is done.