Painting a fireplace

We are so lucky and fortunate to have two homes.  One is a vacation lakefront cottage I have previously posted about and one is a dark and dreary log “chalet” on the ocean.  We hope one day to remove the log home, repurpose it somewhere else and build our dream house in its place but in the meantime we had to figure out how to make it more liveable during the long grey, rainy west coast winter.

One of the major offenders for sucking light out of the living room is this fireplace on the south wall.  Its facade is classic late seventies manufactured stone/brick with grey grout.  I tried my best to dress it up and make it look beachy but …

After looking through Pinterest for inspiration, I decided to paint it white.  The article I consulted said to scrub it down first with a mixture of vinegar and water and let dry which I did.  Next step was to apply primer.  I read on one post that the author had painted the entire fireplace white only to find that she needed to go back and add grey grout lines.  So I thought I’d paint only the stones white and leave the grout grey and judge how that looked.

Okay, so it looked terrible!  I filled in some grout marks and compared the two side by side.

Now that was way better.  Painting the grout lines out was definitely the route to go.

Believe it or not, it took over three hours to paint this sucker.  I wasn’t sure what to do with the ugly tile hearth so I painted it too.  I could have left it like this but as it dried overnight, some of the original colour of the brick started coming through so on with a second coat of primer.  The primer would have been an acceptable colour but I found it just a tad on the cool side. Needing to warm up the room, I painted a final coat with Benjamin Moore’s Simply White.

Which do you prefer?  Be sure to comment below.

Thanks for stopping by!