Covering Up Exposed Brick
I’m a renter in a 1bed in Cobble Hill. I love my apartment but I have really come to detest the exposed brick covering an entire wall of the apartment. It’s not that sort of attractive dusty looking brick, it’s glossy, shellacked, dark, yellowed, light-consuming brick. (And it’s nearly impossible to decorate around if you’re…
I’m a renter in a 1bed in Cobble Hill. I love my apartment but I have really come to detest the exposed brick covering an entire wall of the apartment. It’s not that sort of attractive dusty looking brick, it’s glossy, shellacked, dark, yellowed, light-consuming brick. (And it’s nearly impossible to decorate around if you’re going for anything but the hip 90’s NYC loft look — which.. no.) My landlord will let me do just about anything in the apartment other than painting the brick, because it of course attracts a lot of people.
Does anyone have any suggestions or good ideas regarding how to temporarily cover up the brick?
Right now my current thought is to make floor to ceiling sized frames out of canvas stretchers and cover it with a neutral fabric and securing it to the wall with velcro. If it’s light enough I feel the velcro should hold it without affecting the wall in a way that would bother my landlord.
It would be lovely to have some sort of thin, hard, lightweight board that I could secure to the wall somehow — something I could paint and then remove when I moved out. Any ideas on that?
I would recommand sheet rocking the wall with 1/2 inch sheet rock that later on can be removed call this guy from park slope that does great work and great prices extremely neat at gabipaintinginc@aol.com or 718=331=3889
thank you all for the suggestions. will not be painting as landlord has specifically requested i don’t.
montrose — i will look into homosote, thanks for that specifically.
You could take entire sheets of homosote, which is a compressed paper pulp product, (4’x6, found at HD, Lowe’s, very cheap) and cover them in fabric, or wallpaper, or brown or white craft paper, or even a collage of newspaper or wrapping paper or other materials. You could also prime and paint, too. Papers could be glued, fabric and craft paper from a roll could be stretched and stapled to the back. These could either be just leaned up against the walls, if you don’t have kids or pets to bother them, or hung on hooks from the moulding, ceiling, or descreetly bolted to the walls.
Hang material over walls?
See the apartment decoration efforts at warymeyers.com for more ideas. Many of the apartments they’ve decorated feature exposed brick.
The canvas stretchers are a good idea. I did this in an old apartment with unstretched cotton duck (I just primed it, put a couple grommets in the fabric, and hung it by a couple of nails) to cover a really ugly wall. Plus if you get bored later, you can paint it.
Per usual, just ignore Rob.
i doubt it park sloper. he could always paint it back to the ugly color / texture he says it is now. seriously, just paint it whatever you like. you are the one who has to live there and youre paying to live there, right?
*rob*
Rob, that’s terrible advice. OP would likely lose his/her *entire* security deposit that way.
Ikea bookshelves are cheap. Try lining low bookshelves for all your books and files, and put a large piece of light artwork above. With a couple small lamps, the dark wall might act as a dramatic dark background rather than a light and happiness sucking wall.