In part two we experience our first complete failure. We tried to sandblast the paint off our brick fireplace and it was a complete waste of time, money, and patience. Spoiler alert: don’t do this to remove paint from masonry.

We don’t have any pictures because it was such a mess and it was so frustrating. But we’ll still tell you what happened, why we think it was such a failure, and how we recovered.

If you missed part one, you can find it here.

Sandblasting: a total waste of time

We had the brick stripped down to the last stubborn layer of paint. We saw on a couple restoration blogs (I had one linked here but it has since gone defunct, so I removed the link) that it was possible to “sandblast” the paint off the brick using either ground walnut shells or soda ash. Walnut shells and soda ash are less abrasive than regular sandblasting media. The logic was that it wouldn’t damage the brick or mortar, but it would be able to chip away at the paint.

After a few weeks of prep, like lugging borrowed sandblasting machines and media into the house, tenting off the living room with a tarp twice, and suiting up in full protective gear to sandblast for an entire day … we ended up with nothing. Zero progress on the paint removal and a living room covered in soda ash.

So really, you could even say we moved backwards. Not ideal.

We were discouraged. We had sunk a good chunk of change into sandblasting media, and a whole long weekend into a method that didn’t work at all.

To make matters worse, we had to spend multiple days on soda ash cleanup. Soda ash is incredibly fine (soda ash is the same texture as baking soda) so it got everywhere. We had to sweep, vacuum, dust, and mop the entire first floor of the house.

Why didn’t it work?

While we can’t be totally certain why this didn’t work, we think that in order to remove the paint we would have needed to use a more abrasive media or a higher pressure. Either of those would have irreparably damaged the brick.

We weren’t willing to go through the cleanup of sandblasting again, so we decided to abandon the strategy altogether. Other people on the internet have successfully used sandblasting to remove paint from masonry. We were not going to be one those people.

Using oven cleaner to remove paint

We tried to recover from the failure of sandblasting by finding a method we thought would work: oven cleaner. Yes. Regular oven cleaner. From the grocery store.

The logic behind this one sounded a bit better: oven cleaner is a strong degreaser that could loosen the paint, making it easier to scrub off. We bought about 6 cans of oven cleaner from and went for it.

After a few days of testing small patches and a few days of scrubbing, the result: 

We were surprised and pleased with the results of the oven cleaner. We can finally see the color and texture of the brick coming through. As a bonus, all of the paint is gone from the damper handle, so it’s nice and shiny again. Yay!

Some things we learned:

• Sandblasting inside the house … never again.
• We’re confident we can remove most of the paint, but we won’t be able to remove all of the paint. The brick texture is just too rough. Although we’re perfectionists, we’ve made peace with the fact that it won’t look perfect. Anything is better than the white paint we started with.
• And finally: the truth is that the only way we’re going to get the result we want is to scrub the paint off, brick by brick.