Our fireplace at some point in time was painted an off-white color.
It looks fine but after several years it is really getting quite drab and every time we go to a friend’s house with a traditional brick fireplace we think it looks great.
Finally, we decided to do something about it and we learned you can very easily turn your painted fireplace into a traditional looking brick fireplace.
First of all you will need to paint all of the brick a very dark brown. You can use interior latex in eggshell or satin finish.
You may want to paint a primer on first, since that white paint is such high gloss. In fact, that may help the grout adhere better too. Use a really dark brown, as this will be your “base” color for the bricks.
Use both primer and paint in the grout gaps too. You’ll have to use a brush to get in all the gaps—but should be able to also use a heavy nap roller on brick face. You will need two coats of brown paint.
You will need 2-3 other paint colors, like a darker tan or taupe, a medium shade, and maybe a shade of “rusty” color. Basically you want like 3 other “stone colors” to speckle into look more like brick.
You won’t need much, so you can buy the premixed little paint. Get these in various finishes, like a satin and flat mix. You will need to buy a faux painting sponge, or something to “speckle/dab” the paint.
Put one color in a paint tray, wet the sponge until damp and squeeze out water. Then you dab the sponge in the paint, and dab it around the fireplace brick. The first color used, you dab more often, closer together.
Then you repeat with the other 2 colors and do less dabbing with each color, otherwise you’ll just cover up the previous color. You should see speckles of all four colors when done, including the base color of very dark brown.
You can pick what color you want most dominant and you can repeat layers endlessly until you like what you have!
You barely touch the brick with sponge, in other words you do not push hard. This will give light texture looking variation, and not giant blobs of color.
Thoroughly wash out sponge between colors, getting all previous paint color out, then let semi dry until just damp between colors.
You need to let each color of sponging dry pretty well too, or your colors will just mix together and you won’t get the true contrast.
Finish the project by grouting in between the bricks for a finished brick look.
