Fake Brick Wall

Intro: Fake Brick Wall

One day, I woke up and wanted one of my hallway's walls to be a brick wall. I live in an old apartment building, which is made out of bricks, but I noticed on other walls, that they must have used low quality bricks in the inside walls, so removing the plaster could lead to much dirt and no nice wall, so I didn't go with that option.

I scouted several options like brick wallpapers (yuck!), real bricks (expensive), fake fiberglass bricks (also expensive)... but then, at the office I saw many old foam core boards (KAPA Line), I had salvaged from other projects.
These boards are 5mm thick with coated paper on the front and the back. One side had a print on it and as I peeled it of, it resulted in a nice rough paper surface. So that was, what I was going with.

STEP 1:

I cut the boards up in many pieces of 6cm x 25cm, 6cm x 12,5cm and some 6cm x [random]cm to add some variation. Then I cut some 1cm strips to use as spacers.

I started by drawing some lines on the wall using a level to guide me. Then I glued the tiles on the wall using tiling adhesive. Since the tiles are very light, they stuck pretty good and didn't come off 'til the glue cured.

Using my spacers I kept adding row after row, randomly picking tiles, but tried to arrange them so they would look realistic. This took about two hours.

STEP 2:

Next I beat up the edges of the tiles using a rogh rock so it doesn't look too new. Then I started painting the Tiles using a mix of terracotta and black (only a little) and painted the tiles one by one randomly.
The trick is not to paint two neighboring tiles the same way so I jumped rows and colums and then mixed a new batch of color so it started to look natural.

After that was done, I painted the groves grey.

Then I added some weathering with the same grey, some mossy green, yellow and white using a sponge, a brush and my fingers.

Finally I sprayed some grey paint dust around.

That's pretty much it - this resulted in a more drastic redecoration of my hallway, which I will cover in an other 'ible.

Comments

[explosivemaker]

I see what you did there....


looks cool

[Dominic Bender]

The result looks really convincing, thanks for sharing! Only thing I would add would be to get some large board, large enough to cover the wall, and out the fake bricks on there, so that you could remove the whole thing if you ever got tired of it, but I do not know whether that would have actually worked.

And now I have this image in my mind of a brick wall where you can open a secret compartment by tapping certain bricks...

[rimar2000]

Nice result!