Sunday, July 29, 2012

Painting a Cinderblock Fireplace

Our home had originally been well cared for, until the initial owners passed away and the home became a rental. Everrrrrything went down hill from there. The house was well on it's way to being destroyed.  When we first viewed the place with our Realtor, there was a hole (yes, an actual hole) in the guest bathroom floor. You could see right down into the crawl space below the home. Crazy, right?  More on that later.

First I'll show you what we started with:

Here's a shot of our bland and boring fireplace. (This picture is one from the listing ad on the Real Estate website, taking before pictures is something I recently learned the importance of. Basically what I'm trying to say is, none of that hideous furniture belongs to me.)



My original intent was to paint the fireplace to look brick.  I was going to paint each stone a different earthy tone so that it would come out looking like bricks w/ a taupe colored grout.  I came up w/ this idea after reading Pretty Hand Girl's post about painting her white fireplace to look like the original brick again.

My husband thought it would be a better idea to pick out colors that we really liked, that were totally at random, but still went together -- colors we wanted in our future living room (once fully decorated).

I don't have any good 'during' pictures because I did this while I was at home alone, and didn't stop to snap any.

However, here are the after pictures:





Here's a close up:


Tools used for this project:

  • Four 1 pint cans of paint (I used four different colors, you can use more or less depending what you choose) 
  • One large car wash sponge, cut into four small spongers used to dab on the paint
  • One large roller to roll on your base paint
    • I used the brownish gray you see all over and covered the entire fireplace, then painted different blocks at random w/ my other three colors (using the sponge pieces to apply those colors.
    • I did nothing to the grout. Rolling on the base paint w/ the roller kept the grout it's original dirty white color b/c the blocks are set up about 1/8 inch, which turned out perfect and saved me a lot of time.