Google+ House Revivals: Putting Lipstick on a Pig (or Painting a Faux Brick Wall)

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Putting Lipstick on a Pig (or Painting a Faux Brick Wall)


We have a really ugly wall in our house.  I mean *really* ugly.  It's a former owner's DIY faux brick wall. Did I mention that it's ugly?  I actually coined a new word to describe ugly faux brick: fauxgly.  Lest I offend someone, let me just say that not all faux brick is ugly.  When done right it can be very attractive.  Mine was not done right.
We're not going to demo the wall right now, because it is the outside wall of our stairwell, and we are thinking we may re-orient the stairs in a future remodeling project.  We don't want to redo the same wall twice, so we are just leaving it, for now.  But, my goodness, it sure is awful.  Many of the "bricks" are broken or cracked, and they are not laid evenly.  In fact, the lower courses slope a good three inches from one end of the wall to the other. I decided to paint the wall, to kind of camouflage how bad it is....
There was also a giant hole in the wall.  I kept imagining it was a spider hole, so I taped it up and patched it.  Yes, it's an ugly patch, but seriously, an ugly patch isn't going to make this wall any worse than it already is.
Nobody is sure what that funny white box is that is hanging on the wall.  The electrician thinks it may have been part of an old security system.  We're not even sure if the wire is still tied in to the home's wiring.  So, there it stays until the electrician removes it.
Here is the wall, after a couple of hours with a brush and some Kilz.
It's still pretty ugly, but at least it blends a little bit with the other walls, so it's less of an assault on our senses when we enter the space.