Painting Brick Fireplace – From White to Beautiful Brownstone
This is the first in a five part series on renovating our living room:
1. Faux painting brick over a previously painted white brick fireplace (this post)
2. Lightening up a room in 5 steps
3. Painting decorative graphics on a wall
4. Preparing to Install Antique Heart Pine Floors (and living to tell about it!)
5. Installing Heart Pine Floors and the Final Reveal
I know the trend lately is to paint fireplace brick white. Especially if the brick is an ugly bright red or some other ugly color. I’m pretty sure that is why our fireplace was painted in the first place.
Painting Brick Fireplace
But, the fact that our fireplace, mantle and the built-in bookshelves on both sides of our fireplace are white, made for an overwhelming amount of white on that one wall. I thought about painting the mantle, but only briefly. I really wanted the warmth and contrast of bricks to set off all the white in our living room.
I stumbled across a few websites showing painted brick here and here. Then I thought, “If someone can do it, then there is a 95% chance that I can do it too!”
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out, but in the end I am amazed by how real it looks. And, how easy it was to do! The true test came when I fooled the builder of our house (he has lived on our street for over 30 years) into thinking I had stripped the paint off the bricks! Sweet success.
This is a relatively easy project. It took several hours, but can be done in sections.
Painting Brick Fireplace Materials Needed:
TSP cleaner
Scrub brush for use with TSP cleaner
Drop cloth
Newspapers
Painters Tape
Paint Roller and Tray
Stiff 2″ paint brush
Car wash sponge or large 6″ x 3″ sized sponge
Spray bottle with water
7 paper plates
Rags for clean Up
Acrylic Paint (see below for colors)
Before you do anything, buy some TSP (tri-sodium phosphate) cleaner at the hardware store and follow the directions to clean your brick. Be forewarned that you may actually like the color of your bricks once they are clean and dry! If you still hate the color, proceed…
After working up a test board by playing with several color combinations, I chose a warm brown brick color. I also tweaked my mortar color before painting it on my fireplace.
I covered the mantle and bookcases by taping newspapers to them. Then, covered the floor with a drop cloth.
I mixed up a small container of my mortar color. I used some leftover latex satin taupe paint from our other house and added some black and a little dark brown to achieve the perfect mortar color.
My color looks like this warm gray cement color:
I painted all the mortar areas between the bricks with a 2″ paint brush.
As the mortar color dried, I mixed up a bucket of my base color for the bricks. Then poured it into a paint tray.
Then, I laid out my seven paper plates and filled the first one with a deep chocolate oops paint (Valspar Latex Eggshell Chestnut).
And poured a half dollar size of the following colors onto the other plates (one color per plate).
I used a paint roller to roll the base color onto small 3′ x 3′ sections of my fireplace. (Don’t worry if the paint doesn’t soak into all the grooves. Some of the white showing through made my bricks look old and rustic.)
While the base color was still wet, I covered my sponge with the Chestnut color. Then dipped the sponge into one or two of the brick tint colors. I sponged one brick at a time using the same color tints sporadically around the wall. Keeping the brick colors varied and random make them look real!
When the sponge needed to be reloaded with paint, I began with the chestnut color first, then added one or two new color tints to the sponge. You will have to refill the paper plates as you use up the paint.
I kept working in small sections, to be able to work while the base color was still wet (use the spray bottle of water to lightly wet the bricks if it dries too quick).
The best part was that if I didn’t like a color, I could go back over it and try a different tint. Notice how I randomly dispersed the darker brown bricks. This is key to having a realistic look.
On the hearth I had to press more gently with the sponge since the mortar lines on our hearth were almost level with the bricks. I kept a wet rag near by to wipe up any wandering brick paint.
Notice how the white specks showing through really make the bricks
look like they are re-claimed and rustic.
And for those wondering how long this took. Including the prep work (cleaning, taping, mixing colors) it took about 5 hours total. Not too bad since I’m a night owl and could watch DIY network while painting!
Next up in the series: 5 Ways to Lighten up a Dark Room.Â
Followed by: Painting Decorative Graphics on Your Wall.
And I saved the best for last (coming soon): Installing Antique Reclaimed Heart Pine Flooring
That is fabulous! I can not believe that you painted that! You truly have a talent! Fantastic Job!!!
Amazing! Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine you can paint bricks like that! They look wonderful and I agree, it looks much warmer now:)
Wonderful! I have an unpainted brick fireplace and whenever I see someone paint one white, it makes me shake my head a little. I love the natural look and I love that yours totally looks like it was never painted. Awesome!
Wow! This looks GREAT!! You did a fab job! Thank you for sharing how you did it – this might be a "bookmark it" page, should we ever have a similar problem for a future home! Great instructions!!
OMG you are a true artist, that is amazing!! Man that took guts to even try, what a great job!! I am visiting from Debbiedoos.
Carol
Oh wow! Lookin' good! Gonna do that in home I'm staging!
xo – jami
i m a g i n e
Your fireplace looks great! Your were smart to paint it. Ours was red brick and we did the same thing.
-Rene
wow! That is amazing! I can't believe how nice it looks! Just goes to show you that not everyone has the same tastes. Just because it's trendy doesn't mean everyone wants their house to look the same.
Wow, that is skill! It looks like brand new bricks!
You have made my week! We have a brick fireplace with the brick hearth, too, and Fred was feeling like we needed to do something with it – paint it, replace it with stone (!!! $$$$ !!!)… but now that YOU have turned your white one BACK to the brick we already have, he's listening to my "leave it alone!"s.
So thank you. So. Very. Much.
I can't believe you even attempted this. So cool it looks so much better. Love this! You have to link this to my Upcycled Awesome Linky party at http://tinyurl.com/Upcycled10
Dang, Brittany! I worked for several years as a decorative painter and I gotta' give you props- you did a great job:) I agree, as much as I'm loving the white trend lately, the real brick look sets off the rest of the room much better. You are awesomesauce.
Wow! You really did a great job on that. I can only imagine the amount of patience it takes to do that. I would be going back over my work so many times! LOL! I can see painting over ugly brick, but I always cringe when I see people painting over perfectly nice looking bricks. Wonderful restoration!
That is amazing and beautiful! I would never have know it wasn't originally a brownstone fireplace!
A LOT of work I see…but so well worth it….it looks awesome…so much like the real deal who would know? Just you is all!!~ Thanks for joining in the party, really great inspiration here. Debbie