DIY Fireplace Update
When we moved into our new AZ house, this DIY fireplace update was at the top of my project to-to list! I immediately knew I wanted to paint it white to give it the modern farmhouse look I LOVE! It’s the first thing you see when you walk into the house and its pretty big, so it’s a focal point. Plus, the room it’s in is dark so we knew painting it would also brighten up the whole space.
Our supplies:
Tools to pry off mantle (if needed)
Degreaser
Wire brush
Paint brush
Small roller
Kilz primer
Satin white paint
Black spray paint (for the brass door)
Like I said this was on the top of my project to-do list.
Like many things we do, we kind of just decided to do it on a whim one day. We started with the mantle and we got REALLY lucky right away with this DIY fireplace update.
I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do with the mantle, but I was thinking natural wood or black. And guess what we found as soon as Jas took the white part off of the mantle?! The original mantle!! It had a couple paint and stain jobs so our hope was to get it to light enough to stain or paint. All we needed to do was strip it and sand it down! First we stripped off the black paint to see what we were working with and then we sanded it to get the natural wood color. Since, I ended up really liking the natural color that’s what we kept it as!
I’m not gonna lie, this mantle did end up being more of a project than I originally thought it would be. The bottom part alone took like 10X longer than the rest of the beam. But it was worth it in the end! It literally saved us from having to buy a mantle. So we got to repurpose the existing one and it saved us like $500!
Once the mantle was done, we cleaned the fireplace with a degreaser and a wire brush to get all of the grime off. Before the painting started, we also covered the mantle so that our fresh DIY work wasn’t messed up! This is a big fireplace, and to make sure we covered everything, we worked in two steps. First we went between all of the bricks with a brush. Then we went back over everything with a small roller. Keep in mind we primed it first, so once the whole thing was primed, then we moved onto the actual paint – which happened to be white, like the primer.
I am obsessed with the finished look! I just sit and swoon over how good it looks. Honestly, I’m pretty proud of Jas and I!! To finish off the room, we had painters come by and paint it white to match the rest of the house. The whole room is so much brighter and I love how it’s the first thing you see when you walk in! If you want to watch the whole fireplace transformation happen, I have a highlight saved on my Instagram!
