Blog #2

Removing paint from burnt adobe walls

In May 2024, I received a call from Sarah, who needed some holes in her interior burnt adobe home filled. She had purchased the house about three years earlier. I usually ask customers who call me for their address so I can look up their adobe home online. This often provides helpful details and context for my conversation with them.

Sarah provided me with her address, and while we were speaking on the phone, I googled it and found a Zillow listing with excellent pictures of both the interior and exterior of her home. The exterior pictures revealed that her burnt adobe had been painted. I mentioned this to her, and she confirmed that the entire inside of the home had been painted as well.

This was an unfortunate decision made by the previous homeowners for several reasons, which are beyond the scope of this blog post. What I want to focus on is the issue of homeowners painting the interior of their burnt adobe homes. Decades later, when they sell the home, the new owners sometimes want to return to the original look of the adobe and will call me for details on how this can be done.

Early in my career, I did at least one job where I applied a stripper called “Peel Away” to two interior walls and went through the difficult process of removing the paint. Here is the page on this website where I go into some detail (when you click on the link and are taken to the page, use the keyboard shortcut “Command” + “F” [on a Mac] for the “find” function and type in “Peel Away”).

This was a time-consuming, tedious, and extremely messy job, one I never wished to repeat. The end result was decent, though not as good as I had initially imagined. However, it certainly looked better than if the room had remained painted, and the customer was pleased.

I never took on another job like this again. However, over the decades I’ve been in business, such requests have come up periodically. This made me think if there were a more affordable, faster, cleaner, and more efficient way to remove paint from adobe walls, it would be an excellent and much-needed service for my customers.

Each time I received such a request, I would search the internet to see if any new advances in technology or chemicals had emerged since I did that job years ago, hoping someone had discovered a better method than mine.

One method is sandblasting the paint off the walls, which has been done before. Nevertheless, without even seeing the results of this process on burnt adobe, I knew it was not a method I would try or suggest. Why? Mainly because of the mess it would create. Sandblasting inside a home while someone is living there would be, in my opinion, a nightmare. The dust it would generate, despite a contractor’s best efforts to protect the room or other areas of the house, would be overwhelming. This is one of the primary reasons I would not recommend this process.

Second, the blasting sand used in sandblasters is toxic to the lungs, necessitating respirators for those doing the sandblasting. These tiny particles of sand will inevitably drift not only in the room where the sandblasting is happening but also into other parts of the house, permeating the living spaces. For individuals with certain allergies or sensitivities, this could lead to health issues or even require a trip to the emergency room.

Beyond these reasons, the impact on the adobe itself is a major concern. Adobe is soft and easily damaged; it is not like concrete or cement block but made from dirt, making it unsuitable for sandblasting. I instinctively knew sandblasting would be detrimental to the adobe, especially for exterior adobe, where the fired “skin” provides the primary layer of protection against water erosion. Once this skin is compromised, the rate of erosion and deterioration of the adobe increases. Sandblasting would remove this essential protective layer, exposing the home to numerous water intrusion and deterioration issues.

Though this sandblasting job was done on the interior of the house—in the kitchen—where water is not as significant a concern as it is for exterior adobe, kitchens do produce their share of moisture. In certain situations, this moisture might adversely affect the adobe.

But I had never seen, whether in real life or in photographs, what sandblasting did to the surface of burnt adobe—until my call from Sarah. Interestingly, she had hired a sandblasting company to work on her kitchen. It was in this same kitchen that she needed some adobe blocks replaced due to other work she had done in the room, which is why she called me in the first place.

Above and below are some of those pictures:

I did not like what I saw in the pictures. Having worked on burnt adobe homes for almost 40 years, I developed a trained eye to be able to pick out the differences between a healthy looking adobe and an unhealthy looking one. In this case, the sandblasted adobes appeared unhealthy: rough, scarred, and significantly altered from their original appearance.

What is interesting, though, is some of the adobe faces appear less scarred and rough than others. In examining Picture D, look at the adobes the red arrows are pointing at. You will see they are less scarred than most of the adobe faces we see in the other pictures. I suspect these unscarred areas, perhaps hidden behind cabinetry or appliances, never had a coat of paint over them and thus were spared being sandblasted.

You will also notice that not all the paint is removed, even with the power of a sandblaster (see picture D, to the right of the pipe). While it’s likely that prolonged sandblasting would eventually remove all the paint, there’s a significant risk of damaging the adobe itself, potentially turning it into a heap of powder. Therefore, the technician operating the sandblaster had to make a judgment call to stop blasting at a certain point in the removal process, leaving behind stubborn paint chips and flecks.

It’s possible that there was some type of cabinetry or appliance blocking the area in Picture D from the sandblasting process. If you look closely, you can see, as noted above, the paint still evident to the right of the pipe, forming a straight vertical line. Imagine an appliance or a set of cabinet drawers surrounding the space and covering the pipe (possibly a dryer), with the adjacent area then painted, leaving behind the distinct outline that we can observe.

Sarah informed me this company charged her $2,000 (this particular room is relatively small) and took them one day to do. Though pricey and the end result is not all that appealing, the upside to sandblasting is the quick turnaround time: one day as opposed to days for removing the paint by chemical stripping.

My opinion, as I stated above, is decidedly negative and I would not chose this method for paint removal from adobe walls.

If you have information on how best to remove paint from adobe walls, please email me at adobemastr@gmail.com.