Bed Stuy Reno

Painting the Brick Wall to Prep for New Built-In Bookshelves

First order of business before G and I could really get into building the new bookshelves on the lower level was to paint the exposed brick wall. The lower level does not get a lot of light, and the unpainted brick wall tended absorb light rather than bounce it around. G and I had seen friend’s apartments with painted brick walls, which we really liked, and we started to get into the idea of painting ours. We thought painting the wall white would bring light coming in through the windows deeper into space, and brighten it up in general.

The painting took a while – we rolled what we could, but it took a lot of hand painting to get into all the nooks and crannies of the wall, and cover all the mortar between the bricks. We really dug the result in the end – the space was transformed, the white made the room look more finished and bright, but we still had the texture of the brick wall we liked. And we were now ready to get into actually building our bookshelves.