Painted brick below damp course

[gav8]

Hi, first post, I'm a bit of a DIY newbie, hope you can help me...

We moved into our house a year ago and the previous occupant had recently painted the inside of the garage. Some of the paint near the floor has now started to turn to dust and some parts are flaking off. It only seems to be the bottom 2 layers of brick doing this and I can see from the outside that these bricks are below the damp course.

What should I do, is the paint keeping moisture in the bricks and causing them damage? Should I sand the paint off these 2 layers of brick?

Gav.

 

[gav8]

Anyone?

Should this be in a different section, more related to building??

 

[JohnD]

just let it fall off.

You can brush it if you want to speed it up.

 

[gav8]

Some of it seems to be taking the top layer of brick with it though, hence the worry

 

[JohnD]

photo?

 

[gav8]

The first image is one side of the garage, the second is the other side.

I've brushed it down to get any loose paint off and it looks like there's some sort of white filler in places, quite a lot on the second image and where it's fallen off the brick looks pretty bad. Should I be worried?

Thanks for helping.

 

[JohnD]

it looks like a fairly modern house, block over brick. The bricks below the DPC will probably stand up OK to being damp. If that is an internal filler, it probably won't. You can let it fall out, or scrape it out, and repoint with sand and cement mortar. If it is plaster, it is important to remove it completely first as it will tend to attack the mortar in damp conditions.

groundwater usually contains dissolved minerals, which will precipitate on the surface of the bricks as hard crystals as the water evaporates, this will tend to push paint off but as long as it can reach the surface, will do no damage except cosmetically. The bricks will do best if they are exposed to the air so they can dry out, so remove the paint below the dpc. As long as the dpc is undamaged and unbridged, the water will not reach the blocks above it so they should not get efflorescence once the original mortar has dried out.

You can brush off the crystals with a wire brush if you want to.

Some bricks will lose their faces if they are wet when frosty weather comes and the water freezes. This is a different problem.


If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs...

 

[gav8]

I'll scrape out the filler and have a go at repointing it.

So will the damaged bricks be ok? They're in the garage, so aren't open to the weather and are unlikely to freeze.

Thanks for the reply, I'm keen to learn about looking after the house, so the detail is much appreciated