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Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Whitewashed the Fireplace!!


OK so we finally got our fireplace working after almost a year in here. We thought it was something serious and the whole time it was only a broken bolt on the flue. Yay!! Now we can enjoy a nice fire  every night!

Our house was built in 1928 so there is a lot of old charm. One of those is our fireplace. It has a gorgeous surround, but ugly brick and red tile around the actual fireplace. It doesn't exactly fit our style of clean lines and neutral colors.


So, Mike and I randomly decided on Saturday to whitewash the brick. We looked up a few YouTube videos and blog posts and finally decided our game plan. It seemed quite easy and everything we read told us to try it so....off to JBK we went to collect our supplies!!

The whole process was incredibly easy. We literally mixed white latex paint and water in equal parts and stirred it with a paint stirrer. Then, found a paintbrush in the basement and went to work.

Mike isn't very good at straight lines so I started in on the inside and he monitored my work. This is where our experimentation came into play. In one of the blog posts we read the couple wiped off the excess paint before it dried. In another, the blogger didn't mention this so we assumed she just let the paint soak in. The major concern of us was that our bricks were very smooth. Most of the things we had read about or seen had very coarse, rough bricks. So, on the first part we used a sponge. Don't use a sponge!!! It left too many lines in the paint and it looked awful. So Mike went upstairs and grabbed an old shirt and we used that to gently wipe off the excess paint.

This was definitely the better of the two and decided to go with it for the rest of the fireplace. We finished up the first coat and let it soak into the brick a little while we decided whether to put on another.

(In hindsight I kind of wish we had left it a little lighter, however, I'm still happy with the result) You can see the streaks from wiping off the paint but I'll tell you in a sec how to make them a little less noticeable. 

We decided to add another coat so I went at it. This time I painted the entire fireplace and let the paint soak in a little before wiping off the excess. When I wiped the paint off, I took the rag and gently but quickly wiped in the same direction as the brick. As you go there will be extra paint on your cloth and you can kind of go back and even up where you may have wiped too hard. This will also remove some of the paint from the cloth so it doesn't get too gooped up. 

That's it!! When that's done, it's done!! It was definitely super easy and we got the entire process finished in about 40 minutes. Just in time for the Ravens game!!! Too bad we lost. :(

Here it is!!

 and again...


and finally....

 

Here's the difference!!


1 comment :

  1. Love it You're so good at this homeowner thing ;) Your house is gorgeous <3

    ReplyDelete