We're back from a brief hiatus! And I have better pictures thanks to my mom letting me use her fancy camera. And not a moment too soon. I couldn't go much longer without sharing the above picture of our wacko dog (and Dave and I on our first night in the house) with the world.
Now, on to the more important stuff. When we moved in our family room/den area looked like this:
Pretty depressing, huh? The dark brick on the fireplace wall just sucked the light out of the room. To top it off, there were dingy, dark mauve colored walls, bottomed out by some (albeit real wood) wood paneling on the bottom. In short, it was not our favorite room to be in. In fact, we spend most of our time in the living room where our big TV and entertainment center is set up. However, its just off the kitchen and we really wanted it to be a place to chill out, entertain, and get cozy in the winter next to the fire. Not to mention the fact that we spend lots of time in the kitchen cooking, and we wanted something pretty to look at while we did.
So we googled around and found out how to paint a fireplace. Most blogs we looked at recommended an oil based primer if the fireplace was particularly sooty. Our wasn't, but it did have some grout that was crumbling off on the hearth so we didn't want to take our chances. We primed that with the oil based primer and finished the rest with a latex primer. This was the hardest part of the job because the porous bricks just sucked up the paint. Thankfully, my brother Jim was in town and was kind enough to assist with this phase in exchange for some of our hometown brew Three Floyd's. This part took about 3 hours.
Then, we finished it with a creamy vanilla colored, eggshell finish latex paint. This took a long time as well, making sure we covered up every single indication that there ever was a brown brick wall beneath. We were so happy with our finished product:
Its so lovely, isn't it? The difference is so remarkable. There is so much more light in the room and it looks a thousand times bigger. Can't you just picture sitting in this room in the winter with a fire going and a glass of red wine? It almost makes me excited for Winter. Almost.
We also had to do something about the brown walls. We wanted to go just a shade darker than the fireplace so that there was depth but no noticeable difference between the two. Because the fireplace was a whole wall, we wanted to make it seem like part of the room instead of its own statement. Lots of bloggers recommend a stark white for a fireplace, but we felt like a whole wall of bright white would make the space cold instead of warm and inviting.
This picture best illustrates the difference between the former wall color and the new one:
See what I mean about the walls being just a tad darker than the fireplace?
You might be wondering about these pedestals on the fireplace. They do look a tad weird just sitting bare. The former owners had long, thick, dark pieces of painted wood balanced on top of them which you can see in the very first picture of the post (my mom found out were not screwed in when she tried to use one to hoist herself up when she was helping me clean . . .thankfully there was no fall). We plan on purchasing thinner pieces of wood on top of them that we've stained. We'd like to keep a raw wood look to make things look a little rustic, and put some bright accessories to keep the room cheery.
The next step will be to paint the wood paneling with Olympic's "delicate white" in a semi-gloss finish. It will be so nice to sit in a light and airy room. I guess we'll have to furnish it then. Hmmm.....One more thing: See the lovely wood railing below? Dave (my hero!) ripped it out our second night in the house. It dated the house unbelievably and cut what would be a very large and open room in half. It had to go, so Dave pried it off with a hammer. I tried to pull it off by myself while he was at work, and suffered our first-in home injury. Rather than keep trying I let him do the rest. Here's the before (with the former owner's furniture):
When we pulled the banister off, to our horror, 40 years of accumulated dust, food, and even a few receipts needed to be cleaned up. Hope you're not eating, because this is the sticky mess we had to scrub, using no less than two canisters of Clorox Wipes:
Yum. Once that was done we were pretty happy. Now, the place looks like one big room.
