Fireplace Makeover – Guest Post

I am SO very excited to have Sarah from Little Red Brick House as my very first guest post!!!  This girl is incredibly talented and and her beautiful DIY’s {always} inspire!  Today she’s sharing a fireplace makeover that you won’t believe!!!

---

Hello! I am so, so excited to be sharing my fireplace makeover with you all today! A big “thank you” to Kristi for having me over to her AMAZING blog! I absolutely love her work and am so honored to guest post for her.

I’m Sarah and I blog over at Little Red Brick House about all things DIY, home decor and creating. Whether I’m giving new life to an old piece of furniture or solving organization issues around the house, I just can’t get enough of creating with my own hands! So naturally, I couldn’t wait to tackle such an in-depth project like our fireplace.

You would think that being first time homeowners we would want to ease our way into DIY-ing with a small project like window treatments or crown moulding. Well, we decided to dive right in and remodel our fireplace. Being such a focal point of the room, it was hard not to notice everyday. Most people would look at the before picture and think that nothing is wrong with it and really, there isn’t anything wrong. Only, it’s not our style and we felt like it could be so much more.

We had big dreams for this space and I literally couldn’t wait to get started. After weeks of my husband putting off the renovation, I just grabbed a hammer and whacked away into the wall tiles to see how easy they would be to remove. To my delight, they crumbled off pretty nicely. And to my hubby’s horror, the start of the fireplace demo had officially started! There was no turning back at this point because in just a few short weeks we had family coming in from out of town to visit.

Here’s a picture from the MLS listing when we were house hunting. I’m not a huge fan of the faux finish wall and that trim around the tile is just too dinky for my taste.

And here it is after we painted the living room a lighter color and started the demo process. Please excuse the terribly grainy iPhone picture. And don’t mind the fat cat photobomb. Oh, and apparently we don’t know how to paint without getting it all over the ceiling.

The floor tiles on the wall weren’t really our thing, so we knew that we wanted to replace those with stone or marble tiles. In the end the stone won out and we couldn’t be happier.

We ended up adding columns in the front and planking on the wall. The mantle was lowered three inches to lose some of the awkward space between it and the firebox.

In the future, we’d like to replace the gas logs with glass crystals and glass doors. But for now we’re really happy with the progress we’ve made. The room definitely feels lighter and brighter and is more “us”.

You can check out the demo process and pillar construction and also see how we made our planked wall.

 

---

SUCH a big thank you to Sarah for sharing this stunning transformation!  Be sure to pop over to Little Red Brick House to check out more of her fabulous work!