Craig & I moved into our home going on almost 2 years ago now. For the most part, not a lot needed to be done so I wouldn’t at all call it a “fixer upper” but there were some more aesthetic sort of things we (read: I) had in mind to change eventually. Last month, we updated our small master bathroom with tearing off the horrible “built-in” medicine cabinet style mirror from the wall, adding fresh paint on the walls and cabinets, and of course a new mirror & light fixtures. Overall it wasn’t a big reno but those changes made a big difference! If that’s something y’all would want to see on the blog, let me know and I can do a post about that too! But okay, back to the fireplace. I digress. The mantle was just this big, ornate thing and there was this really ugly square tile on it. I always knew I’d want us to change it eventually…so last weekend we finally did it and I’m going to share our modern farmhouse-style fireplace renovation with you today!
Modern Farmhouse-Style Fireplace Renovation
The Before
Here’s the before picture:
To start the renovation, we obviously had to remove the existing mantle. We were not sure what was underneath the tile, and what shape it would be in…we were thinking it was probably brick but there was no real way to tell until we started taking things off. So we got to have our own little fun “demo day” and rip this sucker off the wall. It comes off pretty easily really. All you need for this is a pry-bar and a hammer. If you saw my Instagram stories, I documented a lot of this. If you missed it, head to my profile and click on the “home” icon and you can still watch 🙂
Voila! It’s off!! See ya, sucka.
And YAY…there’s BRICK underneath!! Now all we had to do was get all the mortar off. That was not fun. We pretty much just manually used chisel and hammer to break it off and get it as smooth as we could. I didn’t need it to be perfect, because I felt like a little bit of texture could be a good thing!
For real, I can’t for the life of me understand why someone would put tile over this brick. *face palm*
Progress
Here’s sort of our midway point. I started painting the brick (we used this primer and then just a regular white matte paint, sorry I don’t remember which! I don’t think it matters though) and Craig started making the mantle. SO MUCH cheaper than buying one! Here is the tutorial we used for that. We just did a Lowe’s run and got the lumber and other supplies we needed!
Yes, he was out there working past dark! He stained the mantle after he built it so it was able to dry overnight.
The next morning I did another coat of paint for good measure, and then once it was dry, we hung the mantle and Craig started patching the wall where the other mantle went into it.
Then we started reassembling our living room and putting things back into place.
You know how long the process took? We started around 12pm on Saturday and we were done by 4pm on Sunday. And that was with us going to church, getting breakfast, etc. So we could have FOR SURE turned it around in 24 hours if that was all we did. It was a pretty easy flip!
So even though it was done on Sunday, I couldn’t share because I was waiting for my decor to come in! Of course that is what really “completes” a project!!
So here we go….
The After
Ta-da!
Doesn’t it look SO MUCH BETTER?! Well, we love it anyways. So clean and I feel like the white brick really opens up the room 🙂 The only thing left to do is paint the top of the trim near the ceiling. It’s not super noticeable but we haven’t quite gotten around to it. Craig has to do the really detailed painting jobs, he’s much better at those than I! But that’s pretty much it!
In case you’re wondering, here’s the list of decor and where I got it:
- vases
- eucalyptus (I put 2 in each vase)
- mirror
- candle
What do y’all think??
Wanna see more home posts? Let me know in the comments! I already have ideas for our next project 🙂
xo,
Bess
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