Tys Sniffen wrote:well, no. a stiff brush will clean away things, but what it does is gouge away (sand away/brush away) both the lime wash and the plaster underneath it. and I don't really want to remove the entire surface and put a new (6 coats) back on, as that defeats the purpose of having the nice stuff there now, plus would be a huge mess.
I need to know how to get new lime wash to soak into old lime wash.
What you want to do is to "whitewash" it. The word means means something completely different nowadays, but long ago, before the advent of mass consumer marketing and infinite choices of paint colors, "whitewash" meant to rewhiten things by slapping another coat of lime on it.
But it's not as simple as it sounds. As you have discovered, there may be stains that not only don't get washed over, they come right back up through the new coat. What you need to do is to get the baby's handprints and the oil from the dog's fur off the wall first. This is usually done with trisodium phosphate (
TSP), which still can be found at your
local home center, but has gotten a bad rap because of overuse leading to polluted streams. A couple heaping tablespoons in a gallon of warm
water should be good
enough to get the oils off.
Once you have a clean wall, you can try applying a new limewash. However, adhesion may still be a problem if the surface is very smooth. The usual way of making paint adhere better is to create some surface roughness, so before you put the stiff brush away, maybe you need to use it to not quite gouge the surface, but just rough it up a little bit. The ideal is to take a lot of that 6th coat off, but very little of the 5th coat. Your wash is going to be the new 6th coat.
There are all sorts of things that have been added to limewashes in the past to create better adhesion: water glass, glue, egg white, Portland cement, salt,
soap,
milk, flour, and dirt. I like the using the salt and flour method. If you add enough salt to flour, the resulting dough is too salty to support any sort of bacterial life and you have a material that is even more lasting than a Civil War hardtack biscuit. You can either add the salt/flour raw to the limewash, or you can try cooking it until the starch thickens. With thickener in the limewash, you may find it easier to apply. Another factor to consider is not to apply wet material to a dry wall; if you let the wall dry after it has been washed, you may need to rewet it to get the best adhesion with the new whitewash.
There are literally thousands of recipes, but you are only going to find what works best for you by a little bit of experimentation. Do your experiments in a small area and after you finish, let it sit for a couple of weeks to make sure it looks like you want it to. If it doesn't, time to tinker with the surface prep or the recipe a little bit.
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