Fireplace Makeover

Ever have a simple little project that snowballs into a total room takeover?  I did.  And I’m still trying to recover a month later.

One day this last summer a friend and I were hanging out down in the lower level family room when she mentioned how she had rearranged some things in her house and now her mantle looked a bit off.  I pointed at mine and asked if it was as bad as what I had and she sheepishly said, “Umm, no.”

Our fireplace is large and there is a lot of brick to look at.  Eight feet of it.  Our ceilings are quite low so the mantel (once again painted greige to match the greige walls, doors and trim) has very little space above it for decorating.   Add in an oddly placed heater/air conditioner unit and it’s just an ugly mess.

Once the weather started to chill off a bit I decided to decorate it for fall.  This is where the snowball thing starts to gain momentum.  Before I put any decorations up I wanted to give the fireplace a bit of a freshening up.

I’ve wanted to paint the fireplace since we moved in last summer so I finally got myself in gear to get it done.  It took a couple days and a couple coats of paint.  A few paint brushes were ruined in the process.  The mortar is so far back from the face of the bricks that I had to scrub the paint in.

Next came the mantle.  I wanted to sand it back down to wood and have a beautiful chunky wood mantle.  That project was not doable for me.  The wood was extremely rough, so I would have had to sand down almost a half inch in some places.  I gave it a try anyways to see if it would be worth the fight.  I got out my belt sander and put on the meanest grit belt I had, 40 grit.  It should have chewed right through that paint, but sometimes ugly is tougher than you think.  I barely broke the surface.  Where it did get down to the wood it just splintered and became a whole new problem.  Time for plan B: paint it gray.  This is not my final answer for the mantle.  I hope to have it wrapped in wood by Christmas time, but I’m not holding my breath.

So the brick and the mantle were painted but now the rest of the room looked even worse.  It had to be painted also.  I chose Sea Salt by Sherwin Williams.  I had bought the sample for my bedroom but it looked like gray sludge in there.  Down in the family room it took on a soft greenish gray.

With the walls painted the trim looked cheap, which is was, so out it came and new chunky boards were added.  Unfortunately, nothing could be done about that heater/ac unit.   Uggg!

I need to mention I started this project a couple weeks before my husband’s “surprise” 40th birthday party.  Why would I choose to do it so close in time to having 40 people over at my house? Because it was the perfect motivator to get stuff done.  Do you have any idea how embarrassed I would have been to have a room completely torn apart when guests arrived?  Is it A: not very, B: somewhat, or C: very?  The correct answer is C: very!

Now that this project has consumed the majority of the first floor I can move on to the original task.  Do you remember what I had started out to accomplish.  Yes, decorating the mantle for fall.

With it being such a long and squat space I had a hard time trying to figure it out. I pulled out my pumpkin collection and added in some wood boxes, a scale, a couple animals and some leaves.  I had nothing to put up on the wall for art so I painted a little “hayrides” sign to fill in the middle.  I wanted to make some sort of a cute swag to hang down in the front to fill the gap between the mantle and the stove, but we really use this fireplace and I didn’t want to worry about unintentional fires.

It’s amazing how much brighter and more welcoming this room has become just because of the fireplace makeover and pretty painted walls.  While I did get this all done in time for guests to arrive, it is not at all done down there.  I have some shelves to build and install and a large cabinet/bookshelf wall to update and probably a firewood rack needs to be added.  But for now, I’m calling it good enough.

And now, because I really enjoy the before and after side-by-side shots, here they are.