It’s a little scary to paint over brick, I admit. But in soooo many examples that I have seen from other brave souls, I always like how it turns out! So, I figured I’d give it a go and makeover our living room fireplace by painting it white as I wanted something more light and fresh feeling. Here it is before with the (previous) green walls and oak trim.
To get started, I primed the fireplace with Zinsser Bullseye 1-2-3 high hiding gray primer. This baby had some super deep grout lines so it was quite the job to get coverage in between. I wound up using both a roller and a brush.
This picture is about 1/2 way through the brick painting process with the gray primer and the beginning of white paint. I taped off the glass front of the fireplace because of splatter. Since we planned on painting the walls around the fireplace a different color, I didn’t need to be particularly careful about getting paint on the wall itself.
How to paint a brick fireplace (it’s super easy, just takes a little time!)
- Clean your brick and surrounding wall with damp cloth. My fireplace wasn’t super dirty, so you may determine you need a little more than a damp cloth for a good cleaning 🙂
- Tape off any surrounding areas you do not want paint on. While I taped around the glass on the fireplace at first, I made the mistake of not covering the whole glass area. Use a garbage bag or some other plastic to help protect this area.
- Prime all of your brick. I used both a brush (mostly in between grout lines and for cutting in on edges) and a thick nap roller (use at least 1/2″ – 3/4″)
- Once primed, apply your paint color of choice. So exciting!
- Add additional coats of paint as needed. Mine took two solid coats of white plus some additional touch up the third time around.
After the 2 1/2 coats of the white paint on top of the primer, I declared the project done. I love the way it turned out! I’m still not a fan of the green wall paint, but that was to be the next project on the list as you can see from the first picture in this post (Origami white, I love you!). What do you think about painting brick?
If you still aren’t sure, here they are side-by-side!
So what do you think? Are you gonna go for it? 🙂