How to Wash Old Brick

In the room I use as my office I’m lucky enough to have a fireplace. It’s not a working one, but recently we had an old gas insert removed to get it ready to be more of a focal point in the room and now that that old thing is gone I can spend some time sprucing up the fireplace. It is dirrrrty.

But exactly how do you clean a non-working fireplace? It’s quite easy, here is a simple step by step on how to wash old brick.

First, gather up your supplies:

• A dirty fireplace
• Shop vac, or regular vac if you don’t mind some 30+ year old soot in your Hoover
• Sponge
• Bucket
• Baking soda, white vinegar and water
• Old rags to protect the floor and whip up any drips
• Rubber gloves
• Knee pads are a life saver of you have those too

 

First, you want to sweep and vacuum out as much dust and dirt as you can. I believe this dirt {which was behind the old gas insert} was older than me and you combined.

Next, mix up about a 1/4 cup each of baking soda and vinegar with about a gallon of water. This will form a natural and mild cleaning solution for the brick.

With a sponge simply start wiping your brick. I kept a bit of water on the sponge to get the job done better since brick absorbs liquid.

You can’t see much color difference in these photos, but believe me there was A LOT of dirt that was wiped off.

I warned you, 30 years of dirt right?!

At this part in the how to I can tell you a secret about this fireplace. If you notice in the above pics there are some cracks in the brick, as if the house settled at one point and it partially cracked the structure. See?

Because of this some of the pieces pull right out.

It’s like a secret hiding place for money and treasurers. Now if you ever come to my house, you know where I hide my riches 🙂

I don’t know yet if we’ll get that fixed, but for now I’m just cleaning it.

After I stashed some money and finished wiping it all down many times, this is what I had, clean brick! I changed out the dirty water four times, eww!

Rambo is happy his home is much cleaner.

And it’s that easy! Have you ever cleaned brick? Or some 30-year-old dirt?

Not sure what the final plans are yet for this part of my office, but it’s coming along little by little!

See previous post about painting, my risky zebra rug, and a furniture face lift in my office.

Bonus if you can count how many times I said brick in this post!