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Colours

Paint

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See hundreds of unique lime paint colours

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House of Grey Collaboration - 'Visual Silence'  creating calm and balance through colour.

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This is the right guide for you if your surface is:

Not painted with any paint, limewash or other finish

If any of the above does not apply to your surface, explore our other application guides. Review our glossary for terms.

Application Guide: Raw Plaster Interior Walls

Supply checklist

This material doesn’t need a large amount of preparation as it’s already in the ideal state for absorbing limewash. However, it’s beneficial to start by wiping down with a damp cloth to make sure it’s not dusty.

01 Surface Preparation

Step by Step Directions

Plan out the order you’ll paint. We suggest starting with the ceiling. Once you start applying limewash to the wall you’ll need to finish that stretch of surface in one go. This prevents lines showing a start/stop. This means you need to allow enough time to go from a corner to another corner. 

Time will vary of course based on how big your room is, but lime washing is much faster than conventional painting. We would suggest allowing 45 minutes to cover an average size bedroom wall for instance. 

You’ll want to start at a light source, like a window and move away from the light.

02 Painting Plan

When you are ready to paint, open your limewash and decant a third of the paint into the bucket. 

Using your whisk stir the limewash paint. The consistency will be thinner than traditional paint–that’s perfectly normal. It’s important to make sure the pigment doesn’t settle to the bottom, so you’ll need to continuously do this as you’re painting, roughly every 15 minutes.

03 Limewash Preparation

Dip your large brush into the limewash, about a quarter of the way down the bristles. 

Still over the bucket, shake off excess paint. You shouldn’t be dripping paint when you move to the wall.

04 Load Your Brush

Maintain thin layers. Your first coat will be splotchy and translucent. This is good, and will allow the wall to dry properly! If you have applied the paint too thickly, see xxx.

Important

Holding your brush by the head (as opposed to the handle) apply light pressure to the wall and push the paint out in opposing directions. 

Depending on the level of texture you’d like in your finished wall, there are different techniques for how to move your brush around the wall, from moving in x shape in ‘standard technique’, up and down ‘drag down technique’ for a vertical stripe or blending in ‘clouds’ for a softer more subtle look. See our video tutorials for more details. 

Keep working until your brush is no longer pushing anything out. 

Work up to a natural finishing line, like a corner to avoid lines. 

For corners, use your smaller brush and do something something. View tutorial here. 

05 Painting your first coat

Colours appear up to 10x darker when wet!

Once your first coat is done, relax. You will need to wait 12 hours before applying your second coat. 

Pour your unused limewash back into the original container and seal tightly. 

Rinse your bucket and brushes in water. The limewash doesn’t contain any chemicals so you can pour the cleaning residue down the drain or even into your garden beds. 

In the meantime, you can use your room as normal for sleeping etc (no fumes) BUT do avoid touching the wall to avoid marking.

06 Watch Paint Dry

We advise 2-3 coats depending on the colour and your desired outcome. 

Repeat the same steps from your first coat from decaying and stirring the paint through to the application technique. Watch the colour buildup, but remember to keep the layers thin! Better to cover with another thin coat than one thick coat.

07 Finishing Coats

The wall will be touch dry within xx hours, but will take up to 2 weeks (depending on humidity and temperature) to fully cure. This process is nature’s magic where the moisture from limewash evaporates leaving the calcium carbonate and it basically hardens back into stone. 

Once your limewash has fully cured, live as normal. As our limewash paint is absorbent and does not contain plastics or other chemical modifications, it shouldn’t be washed. It also may mean that if it comes into contact with another material like toothpaste or soap it may mark. 

You can allow it to wear naturally, imperfections and all. OR you can simply repaint to cover the marks. If you have used one of our whites you can just paint over the marked area, called patching. If you use any other colours you’ll have to paint the wall from edge to edge, but this can be very quick as you’re only filling in the gaps.