Nightmare fireplace turns into an eye gazer!

When I moved into this house, one thing that always stood out like a sore thumb was the fireplace.  Why on earth would you ever paint over brick?  I tried scraping it off, acid, acetone...unless I sand blasted it, I was probably just stuck with the ugly paint job.  What's worse?  I have two of these fireplaces in my home.

So let's start with the upstairs.  Here's what I'm working with.  This brown color on the fireplace also used to be on the walls.  Not my shade of brown for sure.

UPSTAIRS

So the first thing I started with was the mantle.  I used a gel stain from Minwax to coat this.  I actually didn't even wipe it off like you normally would.  It only took a couple days of drying.  I also decided to spray paint the electrical outlets in a flat black paint.  The only reason I chose black was to match the vents below.

Then I painted the bottom of the fireplace white.  Just some left over paint I had lying around.

I honestly had no clue how I was going to attempt to make this fireplace look any better, I was talking to my mom one day and she told me to just paint it so it looks like brick again.  Wow, that's a simple fix.  I did a little research and found a sponging technique.  I got this idea from Lowe's website.

In the basement there was this fireplace cover, so I spray painted it in a matte black color.

Same thing for these things I found in the garage.

I met a couple of the nicest guys at Lowe's yesterday when I was picking up my paint, one was a house flipper and the other did furniture restoration.  It was nice to talk to some folks that are interested and get excited about the same stuff I do.

I just got a couple things at Lowe's, here was my shopping list:

• 2 large O-Cel-O sponges (1 I cut down to the size of my brick and the other I left large)
• 1 qt of Valspar Signature Satin paint in smoked oyster

Some other things I had handy already that I used were:

• Paint tray
• Cardboard box
• Gloves

It took me about two hours of sponging.  I was a little surprised with how long it took.  Here are some of the first pictures I took.  I was pretty scared at the time of this picture.

Here's the sponging up close.

And the before and after...

With my pictures back up and the newly painted fireplace cover.  I also went ahead and re-spray painted the vents.

DOWNSTAIRS

You'll have to excuse the mess I have going on down here.  The basement really hasn't been a priority for me but something I definitely want to change.  I want to make it look a bit more inviting down there....okay a lot more inviting.  So starting with the fireplace since I'm already doing the upstairs.  Here's what we have going on in the basement.

Well, what do you know...more of that ugly brown color.  That will be the first to go.  I used my gel stain on the shelves and they look pretty neat I think.  I also painted the wall behind the shelving units white.  I thought about a different color because everything seems soooo white.  But I'm going to stain the concrete dark here pretty soon so I'm just going to hope that tones some things down.

I did the same concept for the basement, except at the bottom of the fireplace, the mortar wasn't as deeply set as the rest of the fireplace so we had to cut that sponge down to the size of the brick so that it would appear the same as everything else.  Put all the shelves back and here's how it turned out.

Starting to look a little less scary down there.