Painting and Staining a Fauxe Stone Wall

My husband had done painting all his life and recommended adding the same amount of water as paint when mixing the colors so that it didn’t look fake or like painted stone and that did make a big difference. We would have gone with the stain for concrete since it would be more translucent, but it was about $30.00 a gallon and didn’t come in quarts but only 5-gallon buckets. The concrete paint was $10.00 a quart, and we could practically pick any paint color and Lowes would mix it for us. We decided to give that a try. I love having more options and save money at the same time.

We picked a brown color the same color as our siding, a burgundy, light peach, and gray, light brown. We would not need all of those but at the time we thought we did. I knew in the back of my mind that I would find another project to do since I liked all those colors. We had black and a very light gray at home already so “Let the Mixing Begin!

I found it to be a lot like elementary school when we were first taught to mix colors. After mixing the light gray with the brown and a little dark blue with the burgundy, black with the gray, I felt I had the colors where I wanted them. I used a sponge and thoroughly squeezed all the excess paint out of it. Then I touched the stone very lightly at first to make sure it was the color I expected and kept mixing until I got the color I wanted. I realized that if I made mistakes It could just be painted over to change the color. I learned from a few mistakes, like when I made an entire stone the dark brown it looked completely fake, so I had to go over it with lighter browns. Also, it was a bit of a challenge for me (the bad painter part of me) to keep the paint off the mortar. The original stone had small places where there were peach and reds added, so I decided to try to apply these colors, so these colors are more noticeable and then apply it uniformly on the whole wall. Then I got to the point where I didn’t think it looked like I changed anything. That was very frustrating. That’s when I decided to finish a quarter of the wall first so I could concentrate on getting it done the way I wanted and felt less overwhelmed; then I would know how to do the rest.

The last thing I did that made the biggest difference was apply the light gray. I was careful to the edges on parts of all the stones and on the ridges throughout the stone of which gave it more of a 3d effect.

Concrete paint or stain (we used Semi-Sweet-4003-2c, Café Miel 2008-7c, and Roasted Sepia -6606-2c. The burgundy and peach colors were premixed in the sale section and weren’t marked with the color. Remember that we already had a light gray to mix with these to get the exact color we wanted.