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Friday, June 17, 2011

One of our fireplaces

Why is it that I never come up with witty titles?  Ah well...

Jim's been working SO hard in the front yard.  We plan on redoing both yards this summer and I need to get moving on our back patio.  I've had new furniture for 2 weeks that I haven't taken out of the box!  But I also have my eye on some things inside...

The folks at Young House Love just did a mini revamp of their fireplace and now I have an itch to work on one of ours.  We have two in this house which I consider crazy awesome!  Our last house was a new home in a development and had one of those cut outs for your TV above the fireplace.  I thought I'd like it when we first bought the house and it was nice not to have to have a piece of furniture for the TV, but I soon realized that meant no mantel to decorate!  I saw so many pretty ones online and there was nothing I could really do with ours.  Now I have TWO to decorate and I'm kind of lost.  The one I want to work on first it HUGE.  One is wood burning which we love and used a ton this winter.  The other is non-functional at the moment, but when we reno the room we'll convert it to gas.  Until then, I want to do a little something to lighten/brighten it up.  We don't like the huge mantel as it is but aren't too sure what we can do now.  Here's a picture of our wall o' brick now and the fireplace.
I know the popular thing to do right now is to paint brick white but that's not going to happen.  While I agree that this is brick overkill and really darkens the room, we do like some brick.  It's one of the reasons we wanted an older house, they just don't do things like this in the new development houses.  When we redo this room with the kitchen and dining room someday we have plans to have built-ins built in front fo the brick.  The bottom will be completely closed in with white cabinets while on top there will be shelving and lights with some of the brick showing behind the shelves.

I AM thinking I'd like to paint the wood though.  We don't like it and as I said it's so dark in here.  I tried to do a bit of photoshop work to see what it would look like but it was a mess.  The big issue is I'm not sure I'll like the brick on the inside of the mantel once it's painted white.  So... I thought maybe I could do some type of panels painted white.  This is Layla and Kevin's from The Lettered Cottage.  Can you believe that there's is all brick under that beautiful white paneling?  Whatever I do must be easily removed since as I said, we'll be removing it when we do the "real" renovations. 
Jim's not a big fan of me doing any of this... What do you all think?





2 comments:

ECUTwinMama said...

First, I LOVE what The Lettered Cottage did. LOVE it. But as an alternative to painting the brick white, have you considered white-washing it and then painting the mantle white? You'd still get the beauty of brick, just lightened up some! Here's a link to where Carmel at Our Fifth House did it: http://ourfifthhouse.blogspot.com/2010/12/christmas-mantel.html

Good luck! Post about it!

Clumsy Knitter said...

Ooh...that's a toughie. I agree that the brick darkens the room. I also like what The Lettered Cottage did. I like your idea for the future, but I see no harm in brightening things up a little now by painting the mantel and covering the bricks inside it.