fireplace update |

When we bought our new house one of the things we loved about it was it had a working wood-burning fireplace. I would have settled for a non-working one because I was just excited to have a mantle at all! Who doesn’t love a well-decorated mantle at the holidays? What we weren’t very excited about was the look of the fireplace:

Yep. The whole fireplace area, from the brassy doors down to the paneling above, were woefully dated. After owning the house for more than 7 months, things didn’t look much better–in fact, I think they almost looked worse because the fireplace looked so out of place near the new kitchen:

All we had done was start to peel back the paneling. Yet, thanks to the zillions of ideas available on Pinterest, I knew as soon as we decided to buy the house that I could make over the fireplace on the cheap. I’ve seen lots of other bloggers update old fireplaces with nothing but elbow grease and paint, so I was confident I could join their ranks. Enter this little guy:

Yep, one single can of matte black spray paint (specifically formulated for high heat applications like grills) was all there was to my “step one” of the fireplace makeover–updating those brassy doors! I couldn’t believe how easy this actually was. What took the most time was actually prepping the space to be painted. I scrubbed down the doors with soap and water and dried the area thoroughly. Then, I used some old cardboard that was lying around to protect the brick:

I opened all the windows in the house first, and wore a mask and goggles to protect myself as best I could. Then applied two light coats of spray paint, waiting a few minutes between them:

I waited about 15 minutes and then removed the cardboard, and ta-da!

No more brassy doors! The glass still needs a good cleaning but I figured I’d wait on that until the construction is done on the rest of the house. Next step for the fireplace? Painting the bricks! I’ve gone back and forth on this one a bunch of times, but the brick isn’t in very good shape and the orangey-red just doesn’t work with our design aesthetic, so we’re planning to paint the bricks. Right now I’m leaning towards white, but I’m still looking around at different ideas. We’re actually still not sure what’s under the paneling above the fireplace–more brick, or something else, but we’ll find out this week so I’ll be sure to post soon!