Salitre on brick red wall (before)

When you buy an brick and cement house in México, you will quickly get up to speed on Salitre.  Salitre is kind of acne for walls, and it’s a fact of life here. I wrote about it before in the post Salitre 101.

It took us a while to be ok with living a little salitre here and there on the walls, our NOB (north of the border) perspective was hard to change.  But finally we realized that you can’t love these old houses and be into perfection.  It just isn’t possible.  So in the year and a half since we painted our house we’ve watched as we got a little bit of salitre – then a little more – and finally it got to be enough that it was time to repair it.

Before scraping

We went to Comex and got their recommended sealer and patching material, one for inside, and one for out.  I bought a wire brush and a putty knife.  I bought a sanding block.  And of course, more paint.  At the grocery store we bought muriatic acid.

The process is this:

1. Scrape with the wire brush and putty knife until all loose material is removed
2. Apply muriatic acid (50/50 acid/water solution) 
   Wait one day
3. Apply muriatic acid (50/50 acid/water solution) 
   Wait one day
4. Apply muriatic acid (50/50 acid/water solution) 
   Wait one day
5. Seal with sealer (1 part sealer to 5 parts water)
   Wait one day
6. Fill with appropriate filler.  Wait until it dries
7. Seal with sealer (1 part sealer to 5 parts water)
   Wait one day
8. Paint.  As many coats as it takes to cover.

Scraped and treated with muriatic acid

So as you can see it can take the better part of a week to get one area completed.  I have pretty much made a mess of the entire house as I go from place to place with my little routine.  The hardest part is that you need to turn off fans when you’re scraping in order to keep from spreading the dust, so it gets HOT.  I think I might be done with most of this by the end of next week, just in time for Paul to come home!

For those of you who are  contemplating just painting over the salitre, you can be guaranteed it will be back, usually before three months are up.  And if you paint with dark colors, the white salitre is really obvious, so you don’t want it to come back!