When called upon to paint brick, first see if the brick is dry. See that there is no place where water leaks in from the roof or cornice and soaks into the brick. A brick wall may look dry and still be damp inside. If you want paint to stay on brick, give the brick time to dry, after heavy and driving rains. It is always a bad plan to paint brick in the fall, after the autumn rains. The only real safe time to paint a brick wall is in summer, after a spell of hot, dry weather. You can not always wait for that, but you can tell the owner that it is unsafe to paint a brick wall until it has had time to dry. Why? Because in winter the moisture, which is shut in by the paint, will freeze, expand and throw off the paint or chip the brick.
Prime brick work with a thin coat of good paint mixed in pure linseed oil. Flow on the priming freely, and brush it well into the brick; for second coat, whatever paint you use, put in at least one-fourth white lead; make this coat one-third turps, and rub it well out. Give it a good body. For the last coat, use your color regardless of lead, unless you want it in to get your color. If you want a gloss, mix this coat with all boiled oil, and flow on. For flat, if your colors are ground in oil, use one-fourth oil and three-fourths turps, and if it don’t show flat when painted, it will flat in a short time. The last coat may admit of more oil or may not take as much, and flat. This depends upon the work when started, etc. Some painters make brick flating by breaking up the pigment in japan, and elastic varnish for a binder, and thin with turps. I prefer the oil for a binder, and have made the last coat one-half oil, and had a nice flat in a few weeks. I always ridicule the idea of painting brick flat, because it will not stand as long as an oil finish, and the oil finish will be flat enough in a few months.
CLEANING UP A ROOM.
Now, if I were going to teach a boy to clean up a room, the first thing would be how to prepare himself for the job. In the first place, he wants a damp sponge with a string through it to tie over his head, to hold the sponge over his mouth and under the nose to catch the dust, because it is a great deal more pleasant and a “sight” more healthful to carry lime and other dust in a sponge than in nostrils and windpipe. Then he wants a cotton cloth cap, large enough to draw down over his head and ears, bib overalls and jacket to button close about the neck and he is well fixed. In such a rig he may look peculiar, but he had better look like a monkey than to skin his nostrils with dust and fill his ears and hair with lime, sand and sawdust.
For tools, he needs a good, new, fine corn broom, a wide bristle sweeper (a ten or twelve-inch paper-hanger’s smoothing brush will do), a good duster, a sharp tool to pick out corners, a two-inch chiseled brush for corners. A sprinkler only turns dust to mud, to dry in a few hours and become dust again. When you have swept the floor with your broom and dusted your wood-work and gone over the floor carefully with your wide bristle brush to take what you brushed from the casings and what the broom left on the floor, look at the air across this ray of sunlight; it is full of dust, soon the most of it will settle on the floor and casings and window stools. What then? Wait till it settles and wipe it off with a cloth and don’t forget the tops of the doors and casings. “Why use a cloth?” Well, if you go in and begin to use a dust brush after the dust settles you throw a portion of it in the air again and it will settle on the work. And by the way, I want to say that a wiping cloth is a very important article for a painter to carry. It always makes me “red hot” to see a painter (?), after he has daubed a key shield or a hinge, try to wipe it off with his thumb; I could forgive him for the daub; the best man in the trade may sometimes do that, but the man who will rub part of it off with his thumb and let the rest dry ought to be sent off the job or suspended long enough to take a lesson in the art of wiping off daubs.
I want to say further that every well regulated dusting kit ought to have a dust pan hitched to it in some way. It will save sweeping the dust out on the steps to be tracked in again, save the time you would lose in sweeping the dust over thresholds, or save the time it would take to borrow one.
PASTE FOR LABELING ON TIN.
Make a stiff flour paste in the usual way, with flour and water, then add 2 ounces tartaric acid, and 1 pint of molasses; boil the mixture until stiff, and put in ten or fifteen drops carbolic acid.
ANOTHER.
| Wheat flour | 1 | pound |
| Alum | 2 | drams |
| Borax | 2 | drams |
| Hydrochloric acid | 1½ | ounces |