Painting Big Ben

Lately our fireplace has been making our long skinny living room seem like a dungen on the far end. We have crisp white crown molding and base boards, window frames, ceilings and bookcases that all work well with our dark walnut floors and shades. However, our hodgepodge of dark red and brown floor to ceiling brick fireplace wasn't working with our crisp white clean style. Here are some shots to remind you what we were working with before I got my hands on that porous surface. Oh, and I forget, but we took the fireplace screen off and we like it without, once we need something there to protect I think we'll just go with a screen from Target or something that just rests against it. 

Obviously those burgundy chairs weren't helping lighten anything up, but I have plans for those guys too, no worries.

So finally, after months of convincing Bryan, and only after we got loads of Lowe's giftcards for our birthdays, I picked up the necessary supplies to turn our dungen corner to a light bright white space. All I needed was a gallon of latex Ultra White flat interior paint (we went with zero VOC), a masonry roller and a 1.5" brush to get into the grout grooves. 

Here's Big Ben (yes, I have named our fireplace) after a rolled on coat up top and some grout coverage down on the bottom. Let me tell you, grout painting is not for the weak of wrist. That grout is so porous it's not even funny and it took about 3 gloppy coats to get a good white shade. 

But here he is all painted and clean! He took about 15 hours and the help of a couple people to complete, but I am so so happy with the results. 

Look how lovely he looks next to the baseboards and the edge of the window frame and I love how he pops against the wood floors now instead of sinking in and hiding.

Up close and personal with Big Ben. 

I did not paint the inside of the fireplace because I like keeping it dark and I didn't really want to go through the messy process of cleaning that out. I did do the edge of the bricks that go into the inside just to get a nice clean edge. 

Then the fun part, I got to run around the house and try to dress up Ben with some left over wedding accessories. This is the frame and W we used for our little photo booth area at our reception. The blue vase was a shower gift. 

I finally settled on this arrangement - the W, an empty green frame from wedding, a cream hurricane from a housewarming gift, an 8x10 frame from a shower gift on the left side and a 12x12 frame filled with scrapbook paper that I picked up from Old Time Pottery about 5 years ago and the same blue vase from above. 

Here is a side shot of Ben hanging out with our bookshelf....super. cute. I want to add a nice dark chunky wood mantle soon so we can hang stockings and add maybe a mirror on top to open up the space. But for now I'm just enjoying the new bright space and for around 35 bucks, I think we made a big change.