Anyone had paint removed from stone exterior? Was it worth it?

[Yorkshirelass123]

Hi I own a 1920’s modest terrace. It’s single brick construction and the front of the house is built in stone.

At some point the entire front stone exterior was painted cream. It now looks shabby, so either the entire front needs repainting or the paint removed. I’m not sure which option would be best overall.

I’ve read that paint is not good long term as the house needs to breath (although I have had no problems so far). Cost for chemical treatment quoted is over 2K including scaffolding.

For comparison in my street, one neighbour has never painted their exterior and it’s original beige stone and the other has just re-painted their house grey. So there isn’t a standard on my street.

If anyone has any experience of paint removal from stone, if it was worth it, or general advice, I would appreciate that! What would you do paint or remove it?
Thanks.

We tried to remove paint from portstone (a grayish sandstone) as it was flaking and non breathable. It was a lot of hard work, expensive (labour and hire of specialist equipment and paint remover) and hasn't taken off all of the paint but the hot pressure washers involved took out a lot of mortar and chipped the stone quite badly where the stone was weak already. We intended to repaint anyway, we just wanted a nice new paint finish and get rid of most of the horrible acrylic gloss someone used unfortunately, but we had to do a lot of repointing/filling before we could repaint. We repointed/filled chips in lime mortar and used a breathable mineral paint afterwards. It looks lovely now, but I don't think we could have got it back to bare brick.

Thanks, @NellyBarney that’s what I’m worried about tbh. I don’t really want to remove and then have to repaint/repaint.