Peggy's fireplace repainted stone texture

Here's the technique I used to renovate a terrible looking, but functional, old fireplace. First we cleaned the dirty red stone, and repainted the existing dingy old broken looking fireplace white base coat, then with a lovely brown paper bag wall color adding a second. This treatment cost less than $20 for materials. Cracks patched with fireplace stone fill. This is a very easy technique and we did it in about an hour and 1/2.

1. First thoroughly clean the stone or brick - it should have no grease, it should feel dry.
2. Then spackle and fill with heat resistant spackle. Let dry. Touch up.
3. Prime with paint. Paint the base coat a color such as the paper bag brown used here.
4. While that is still a little tacky, using an old brush, dry brush on another color of paint and work it into the high peaks of the stone or brickwork. We used a darker, red brown to achieve this effect. We also used old rags and newpapers to do the uneven blending.

The same colors were used on the walls of this room.

This is a very easy technique in two steps that completely transformed this fireplace, gives great results and is cheap cheap cheap!

Here's the rest of the room, the fireplace is out of the frame to the left before we installed the hearth slate embedded in the floor ...



View more details on this makeover here - http://www.wonderlane.com/livingroom_renovation2007.html