My basement remodel part 1
When I bought this house, one of the things I dreamed about turning the dark, outdated dirty basement into one of our favorite rooms in the house. When I started I didn’t think it would be that much work…boy was I silly 🙂 This German Smear technique really did begin the transformation from dark and scary to cozy and bright!
The basement was a real mess. I might have been better off with an unfinished basement compared to what I had! The ceiling had these fiber tiles that were yellowed and sagging, the lights flickered, 1 1/2 walls were brick, 1 wall was shingles, one wall was a cement drip effect and the other 1/2 wall was shingles and wood lattice. The floor was cement with the cheapest, thinnest medium brown commercial carpet. There is literally nothing I liked about this room, other than the wood burning stove. I grew up with a wood burning stove in the basement; I love sitting so close to a cozy fire in the winter!
Well here she is! Even in this picture its dark and just looks dirty. The lighting is so poor, and the walls so dark, it’s very gloomy. In this picture I’ve already removed all the old ceiling tiles. (I will post more about that once I have some after photos to share, I’m going to paint the rafters white to give the ceiling the effect of being higher.)
I searched Pinterest for weeks looking for the best way to paint this monster, and came across a technique called the German Smear, that added a lot of white to the brick, while still maintaining the brick-ness. I’m sure that’s not a word, but I didn’t like the effect that painting brick has, the color was too flat and looked like you wished the brick wasn’t there so you tried to hide it (cheaply) with paint. Brick should have character, but I wanted it significantly whiter, cleaner and brighter! This technique did just that.
I only needed one bag of mortar from Home Depot, and a 2 gallon bucket from the dollar store. I had the rubber gloves and a 5″ putty knife. Here is a link to the Versa Bond White I used, but its much cheaper at your local hardware store.
I started behind the stove, since I didn’t have any way to practice the technique. I mixed a small amount of mortar and water until it made a peanut butter consistency. Then I would rub the mortar into the cracks, leaving some extra that I then smeared across the face of the bricks in a random pattern. I would then go back and re-wipe the cracks to grab any excess.
I repeated these steps until there was no excess mortar in the cracks or on the face of the bricks and my glove marks were erased.
I ended up mixing 2 buckets for the entire wall, and it took in total about 3 hours to do just the back wall. Its not hard work, but I moved along in small sections. The mortar is actually very forgiving and doesn’t dry too fast, I found I could go back over my work and the mortar was still malleable even after 30 minutes or more.
I finished up the hearth the following day using the same technique.
Since the hearth bricks used the larger face of the brick I think I will go back and do a second coat to whiten them up a bit more. These still large amounts of brick left visible. But either way it already looks so much better! Its so much brighter already.
There is still another wall of brick, and an old hearth you can’t see in these photos. I still haven’t totally decided what to do with that, its so much brick and I really wish it was not there at all 🙂 I may just do the smear until I have the resources to demo it and remove it at a later time.
I’ll be posting more on this renovation as it progresses, so check back for some nice after pictures!
Update: I made some progress, check out the painted ceilings in this post.