Painting our brick fireplace is something we went back and forth on for months. I actually love the look of a brick fireplace, to be honest. In the end, we agreed that between the lack of natural light in our house and our dark floors, we needed to do it to bring in some light.
This project was on my list for a while and I finally got around to doing it as Blaine was finishing up our fence one weekend. Honestly? It was a lot more work than I had anticipated! In the end it took me about 6+ hours of painting, with some waiting in between coats.
Supplies:
- Roller
- Paint
- Paintbrush
- Tape
- Cloth for cleaning
The instructions and supplies for this project may vary based on what kind of brick fireplace you have. One thing I would add to my supplies list if I could start over was some sort of masonry/concrete sealer or primer. In between the bricks was what made it take so long because it was so porous that it kept soaking up all the paint and needed 3+ coats. By the end I was just glopping that stuff on to get it over with.
Another thing to note is if you have a lot of soot stains you might want to go with an oil based primer underneath or else it’ll show through. In the photos where the fireplace is painted you can just barely see a tinge of yellow at the opening of the fireplace on the right side.
We used the paint above not because of any research we did, but because True Value was having a buy one get one free sale and we love a good deal! We originally got 2 gallons hoping it was enough for this fireplace and the brick around the woodburning stove in our family room, but we’ll definitely need more when we tackle that.
Make sure you tape off your fireplace very well. Because the brick and mortar is uneven, you will more than likely have some of the paint bleed (a few photos down) so the better you tape it off the less bleeding you’ll have. In the right photo above you can see the bright ass yellow that our living room used to be when we bought the house.
I used a roller to cover most of the face of the bricks and saved the platform for last since I was standing on it part of the time to paint. On the right side in the above photo you can see how much our bricks stick out which made it the biggest pain EVER to paint the mortar in between. The poor paint brush I used is now frayed all over the place because I had to jam it in between the bricks to get paint in there.
Finally after many more hours than I had anticiapted, it was done! I pulled the tape off and saw some bleeding. Our floors are vinyl so it was pretty easy to get off there, but the bleeding on the wall is a different story. It’s not that noticable and we plan on eventually painting this room anyway so I’m pretty happy with it!
I’m really happy with how it came out and I love that it adds a brightness to the room that wasn’t there before. My next project for this fireplace is a big, thick wood mantel to match our floors. I’m crossing my fingers I can get Blaine to build me one before Christmas so we can actually put stockings up!
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What’s the paint color you used for the fireplace and walls? Thanks!
Hi Greta,For the fireplace we just used a basic white, the cans are shown in the post. For our walls we used Behr’s “Mushroom Bisque” from Home Depot.
We just got finished painting our FP and around the opening and up the wall about 3ft.is a yellow bleed through stain.
We put two coats on it and it still bleeds through.
What gives.?