A Living Room Facelift

Did any of you notice something different when you looked at the pictures in this post?

If you say the fireplace, you’re right!

Two weeks ago, we decided to move forward with our idea of painting our brick fireplace. The fireplace is HUGE… is takes up almost one entire wall in our not-so-big living room. The brick was a mix of red, orange, tan, and black. NOT attractive. It sucked the life out of the room. It also made the room feel smaller than it already is.

I know some people are not a fan of painting brick. I get that. You can’t go back once you paint it. And some brick looks great au naturel. But this brick was NOT cute and something needed to be done. So, fans of painted brick, read on…  and those who have a panic attack thinking about it, maybe you should skip this post.

Here is what the fireplace has looked like ever since we bought our house over a year ago:

See? Ugly, retro brick. Not to mention we tried everything we could to remove the soot stains in front of the fireplace with no luck. Mission: Beautify Retro Brick Fireplace was on.

After taping off all the edges, I used a roller to roll on white primer.

Then I used a paint brush to paint the grout – a task that just about killed the nerves in my hand.

Here is what it looked like after I got it completely painted white: (with exception to the bottom edge, which I left for Joe to do because I couldn’t move my hand any more) When we had started the process, we planned on painting it white. I had seen white fireplaces before and thought they looked really modern and classy.

After seeing it white, we changed our minds. It needed color.

I took a can of paint that we had planned on using for our hall bath. It was a bit dark so I mixed in some white. I rolled it on, and it resulted in this: We decided not to paint the grout the same color. We love the effect of having the grout white and the bricks tan.Once we were satisfied with the color of the fireplace, we had a few more things to do. The first thing was to re-paint the inside of the fireplace. It looked as though the paint had been there for years, and was stained with rust and soot. It made our freshly-painted fireplace look unfinished.

Joe picked up some flat black spray paint from Meijer, made specifically for fireplaces that can withstand high heat. It took a few coats and now it looks as good as new!

The second thing we needed to do to make our fireplace makeover look complete was to add some color to the living room. Having tan walls and a tan fireplace, along with brown leather furniture, things were seeming a little bland. I picked up some blue curtains from Big Lots and throw pillows and candles from Target. They did the trick!

 

Here is a before and after picture:

 

So, what do you think?