Whitewashing Brick

Despite the depression-inducing weather this week, Spring is here and we (hopefully) won’t be burning fires in our fireplace for a while.

Which means…

IT’S TIME TO FINALLY PAINT THE MANTEL!

A lot of you voted on the color WAAAAY back when…here.

The overwhelming winner was  the very dark gray mantel with the gray walls. (FYI: I received some votes via email from people too shy to comment.) But, it’s my house, and that’s the beauty of the internet–I can still do what I want, because, oh yeah, YOU ALL DON’T LIVE HERE.

When I came across this photo on the internet I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I’d finally found something with brick and a white mantel that looked GOOD. And it was done without someone just slapping white paint all over all of it. (It just seemed so…I don’t know…unoriginal?) But this, this was perfect!

Unfortunately my brick doesn’t have those gorgeous dark undertones to it. It’s kind of, blah red, with some puke-colored flecks of yellow thrown in and an unfortunate orange undertone. Which probably explains why I hate it so much.

So instead of sitting around complaining, like I usually do, I decided to add those darker shades using some paint. (HAH! Scared yet?)

I ran a quick trial on a random brick I found in the garage. (No it’s not even close to the brick on the fireplace, but I like to live dangerously. Heck, I was impressed I had even thought about trying it on something first!)

 And because I couldn’t possibly wait for the black paint to dry first before adding the white wash, some odd shade of gray smudged all over the brick.

I was off to a great start!  With zero hesitancy, I jumped right into black-washing some bricks!

Now we’re talkin’!

THIS time I let it dry before I applied the white. Who says I’m a slow learner???

I used a mixture of this SW semi-gloss white paint with some water mixed in to thin things out. I applied it to the grout with a brush and then smudged it all around the rest of the brick with a clean rag. Very simple.

I started to get a nervous after I had done the bottom row of bricks. Ugh. In fact, I hated it.

I freaked out a bit, but I kept on painting.

And TA DA!

By the time I finished, I was in love with it. It brightened up the brick just enough to make me okay with painting the mantel white. I didn’t lose the character of the brick. And I love that it has a bit more contrast than the blah nothing-ness it sported before.

Now all I have to do is sand, clean, prime and paint that oak…

TO BE CONTINUED!

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