Fireplace Before and After

I'm baaack! Sorry for the little blog silence. Hope everyone had a great summer.

Here's a little what I've been up to lately:

If you could see me, you would see me doing a happy dance. After moving into our house over 13 years ago, I've been dreaming and scheming how to redo our family room fireplace. Now I finally broke my husband down and convinced him to help me out, and you know what? He even said it looks much better and we should've done this earlier. Of course, he will deny he said this, but I heard it, I swear!

So... here's what we were dealing with.

BEFORE

Okay, not totally hideous. But the room just felt heavy with this large amount of brick. It also felt dated to me and the insert contributed greatly to that. Also, we never once lit that insert. Not once.

 Taking this 500lb insert out and getting it out of the house, we no easy feat. My husband surprised me and quite frankly impressed me with a well thought out engineered plan.

Oh, did I mention that we made money on this project? Not too very often you can say that! I poo poo'd my husband that we shouldn't put it on craiglist, thinking who would buy this? Crazy stuff though, it sold quickly and for way more money than I thought we'd get out of it. Again, I will bow down to the mister and say well done!

 Now the insert was out and yikes, it was time to start the painting. I will admit I was SO nervous this was not going to work out like how I pictured in my head. In case you don't know painting brick is pretty much a permanent thing. Ha!

 I got to painting the bottom half and was working my way up when I began rethinking things.  If you recall I have been scheming about this fireplace for 13 years, people and what I have always envisioned was some sort of mdf, or planking detail on this fireplace. I was going to just paint it and see how I felt with just that, but what I really wanted was some planking detail. I showed my husband a photo from Pinterest that I liked and said "can you do this?" and he was like sure, then I was like great....happy dance.

 Sorry, I did not take better shots of all the steps but what he did was nailed about 4 or 5 boards to the bricks, then he nailed the mdf pre-primed planks to those boards and seperated each one with a nickel for spacing.

 Then to finish it off he put the same size planks around the edges to make it look more neater.

 I painted the brick with primer first and followed with Benjamin Moore's Super White in semi gloss. The planking was already primed so I just painted the same paint above as well. This is the same color as my walls.

 Voila! I am a happy camper. I love the arches in the fireplace and wood box, and I love how the beams stand out more now. The room is so much lighter and airy feeling. Love it!

As I am snapping photos I realized I never showed the before and afters of this whole room, since we did our little remodel 2 years ago! I will post those soon. Now that the girls are back at school, I should be getting back to blogging a little more frequently.