From the moment we moved in, the appearance of the living room fireplace drove me CRAZY with its awkward, unbalanced mantel and brick surround. First of all, it was a stodgy red brick mess, which looked like it was plucked from the Little House on the Prairie. Second, the proportions were all wrong.
But as you can see below, my first attempt at disguising its shortcomings by just painting the brick and mantel the same color, failed.
We talked about tearing out the brick and refacing the whole wall in some cool tile, but after a trip to the tile store and doing a little construction and materials math...yikes!
So after noodling around with some ideas, I came up with a very inexpensive scheme to just cover the existing fireplace (no demolishing!)...and to finally make me happy.
To see if my design idea would even look ok, I first bought a sheet of foamcore and cut the pieces in the shapes I had in mind, then taped them to the fireplace. This also would give my husband (who needed convincing) a better idea of how this might look if we moved forward.
So far, already an improvement as far as we were both concerned (photo below).
The asymmetrical design would dial up a more contemporary look and disguise the fact that the sides were not the same width on both sides (a problem we couldn't change, because of wall and door placements).
With husband on board now, we stripped off the foamcore and got to work. The photos below show where he added 2 x 4 framing to the brick to bring 2 of the sections forward. The finished design would reduce the original 4 front planes to 2. And the other photo is a shot in progress after drywall had been attached to the framing.
Then he textured the drywall and sanded it to a smooth finish. Afterwards, we painted it 2 different colors to accentuate the different planes.
I love it! The new design has completely transformed the living room (it also inspired me to rearrange all the furniture).
And here is the REALLY cool part: the entire project cost us less than $40 in materials.
Shut up!
What I learned from this project:
1. If you stare at something you hate long enough (like this fireplace) you don't get used to it, you only end up hating it more.
2. I want remodeling to be cheap, quick, and not messy. Like Botox.
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