The brick home trim guide

Drive any pre-1970 Salt Lake City neighborhood and the pattern repeats: brick walls, painted wood everything else. Pre-war bungalows in Sugar House and Liberty Wells, mid-century ramblers in Millcreek and Holladay, post-war homes in Rose Park. Brick was the default wall material here for decades, and the consequence is that a Salt Lake "house painting" project is frequently a few hundred linear feet of detailed woodwork rather than thousands of square feet of siding.

What the trim scope includes

• Fascia: the vertical board at the roof edge, usually behind the gutter.
• Soffits and eaves: the horizontal underside of the roof overhang, plus rafter tails and gable trim where exposed.
• Window frames, sashes, and sills.
• Door frames and the doors themselves.
• Porch structure: posts, columns, railings, balustrades, ceilings, and steps.
• Garage doors and trim, where painted.
• Foundation vents, shutters, and any decorative wood detail.

Why it costs less, and how much less

Single-story brick homes typically run $2,000 to $4,500 for a thorough trim repaint; two-story homes run $3,500 to $6,500. Compare that to $5,000 to $12,000 for a full-body repaint on a sided house of similar size. Leaving the largest surface untouched removes most of the material and a large share of the labor.

One local caution on the estimate: mid-century ramblers have wide roof overhangs, and soffit area scales with the overhang, not the house footprint. A modest-looking Millcreek rambler can carry more paintable soffit than a larger home with tight eaves. Wide-overhang homes sit higher in the range than their square footage suggests.

Why trim fails first

Trim takes the worst of both local climate problems at once. Horizontal surfaces, sill tops, fascia tops behind the gutter, porch rails, get direct high-altitude sun all summer and hold snow and meltwater all winter. Board ends absorb water through exposed grain. Add over a hundred freeze-thaw cycles a winter and the paint lifts at exactly those points while the field of a wall still looks fine.

The practical read: if the sills on the south side of your house are showing bare wood and everything else looks acceptable, that is the normal Salt Lake failure pattern, not a sign the last paint job was bad.

The prep that matters here

1. Wash. Remove dust, chalk, and organic growth, particularly on north-facing soffits under tree cover.
2. Scrape and sand. Take failed film back to sound edges and feather the transitions so patches do not telegraph.
3. Prime bare wood. Spot-prime everything taken to bare, with stain-blocking primer where cedar or redwood tannin will bleed.
4. Seal end grain. Board ends and cut ends primed before the finish coats. This is where water enters.
5. Re-glaze. Loose or missing glazing putty in old wood sashes replaced before painting.
6. Caulk. Renew joints where trim meets brick and where trim meets trim, with a flexible caulk that survives the freeze-thaw cycle.
7. Two finish coats, cut cleanly at the masonry line.

That last point is worth emphasising. Clean cut lines where wood meets brick are the visible mark of careful work on these houses. Paint slopped onto the brick face is very difficult to remove and permanently changes the look.

Should the brick be painted?

Almost always no, for three reasons.

Moisture. Brick is porous by design and dries outward. Coating it interferes with that, and moisture trapped behind the face freezes in winter and pushes the brick face off. That failure, spalling, cannot be fixed by repainting.

Permanence. Once brick is painted, it needs repainting forever. Stripping paint off historic brick is expensive, imperfect, and capable of damaging the masonry further. A decision that looks like a style change is really a permanent maintenance commitment.

Local guidance. In Salt Lake City's local historic districts, preservation guidance explicitly directs that original unpainted masonry stay unpainted. Outside those districts nobody will stop you, but the technical reasoning does not change with the zoning.

The one situation where masonry coating is a normal conversation is a wall that has already been painted by a previous owner, or stucco, which is a different material with different rules. See the stucco guide for that case.

Refreshing a brick house without paint on the brick

Homeowners are often surprised how much a trim-only repaint changes a house. The brick sets the base tone; the trim, sashes, and front door are where the scheme lives. Shifting a 1950s rambler from white trim to a warm off-white with a deep green door, or taking a Sugar House bungalow's porch from tired beige to a crisp period scheme, transforms the elevation without touching a single brick.

For the seasonal timing on this work, see the painting season guide. Most trim scopes on pre-1978 homes also involve lead-safe practices.