I like the look of aged brick. Please provide a photo. Maybe there are other steps to improve the view.

Thanks for your input. I wondered about brick stain, but do they have to paint each individual brick with the stain?

Here's a pic...

I think the house looks good as is, but if the brick is really in bad shape, i think painting it red is a good option. Keeps the character of the red brick better than painting another color. Here's some examples I found looking around. I would lean closer to orange than to pink or blue for the red, closer to the color of the brick currently. I like the color of the bottom two pictures I posted.

This one is a similar shape to your house. Maybe give you a good idea about it. I think it's a bit too red.

Kind of fun. Less traditional. I like the traditional feel of your house though. It appeals to more people.

I really like the color of the one below. The window boxes are also adorable.

The below picture shows you can still keep the brick texture with paint. This is also a good color.

The house looks very nice. Perhaps we cannot see the problem areas. Is the brick stained or does it have efflorescence? That can be taken care of.

Thanks again to all of you for taking the time to look and comment. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see the fronting of the porch looks different than say, the brick on the second story. It just looks 'messy' to me. I will look into stain versus paint. I think a stain would do the trick, but I'm not sure how practical it is to stain a whole house avoiding the grout lines.

Emily, thanks for finding the pics you added. I had trouble finding appropriate photos.

Maybe we should just go with much more landscaping to block the view of the front of the porch brick ???

Painting exterior brick with conventional paints is a bad idea. The film blocks moisture passing through the brick and the trapped moisture over time will damage /destroy the brick and/or cause mold inside the house. It doesnt happen overnight,b ut give it a couple of decades and it will.

Look into mineral paints aka silicate paints - its a different type of thing, it absorbs into and forms a chemical bond with the masonry rather than a plastic film which sits on top. Water vapor can pass through, but not water molecules (ie rain).

Can be made any color or any degree of transparency or opaqueness - could even send them a brick and have it color matched but then you would lose the sutble variations that natural brick has.

Keim USA, Limeworks, and Romabio are some US vendors. Cost is pretty comparable to higher end paint but much more durable. No I dont work for them! Just did a ton of research on what to do with my own masonry house.

THAT SAID - I totall y agree with above posters that you have a beautiful house and one option is simply to let it be OLD and look old. Glad you wont do white - thats gonna look horribly overdone and tired in 10 yrs or so. Heck, its starting to look that way NOW.

PS Im not seeing in your pic anything that looks problematic, except the pointing in the porch bricks seems different, ie whiter, than the rest of the house?

What exactly is going on that is a problem - could you post some close ups? If its just the pointing being different, then couldn you stain it to match the rest of house? Time consuming perhaps, but not nearly as bad as prepping/painting a whole house. Thx

Wow, thanks for the detailed info, Current Resident. Yes, my issue is that the brick does not have a consistent appearance. We're not living there while it's being renovated, so it'll take me a minute to get any close up shots of the brick issues. Honestly, I never noticed it until I stood across the street and looked at the house as a whole. Now I can't unsee the problem.

Lovely house! When you said the exterior brick was less than stellar, I was imagining something like the old brick Victorian across the street from me - those poor old bricks endured 70 years of exposure to brutal industrial pollution (yay rust belt) and came out pitted, blotchy, and discolored, way worse than the other houses. The folks who are fixing it up tried a ton of things to get the bricks looking decent but finally resorted to painting.

As for brick houses that are painted red, there are a lot of those around me and the majority of them look terrible because it's the wrong shade of red. House usually ends up looking too pink, too bright, or too fake. The few that pull it off had gone with deeper rusty reds.

OP, in your case, the absolute most I'd consider doing, in your shoes, is staining the mortar for a more unified look after repointing. Looks like from the pic that there are two different mortar types - darker upstairs and lighter downstairs and on the porch wall. But then again I'm not sure if that's before/after/during repointing.