Our Fireplace Make-over

We have lived in our current house for 4 1/2 years. It was built in 1968 and was definitely a “fixer-upper” when we bought it.

I hope to show you more pictures of the changes we’ve made on future posts, but my before pictures were not digital, so I will have to take pictures of pictures. Like this post…

One change we made to the house this year was the fireplace in our bedroom. It was hand made from Kentucky fieldstone. I love that it looks rustic, but it didn’t seem to fit in with the way I wanted to decorate our bedroom.

It was very “dated”. It had a huge solid wood mantel, but it was stained an “orange-y” color. And then there was the gold tone fireplace cover that seemed to SCREAM 70’s.

I told my husband I wanted to cover it up with paneling like the rest of our room, because I couldn’t figure out how to make it look the way I wanted. (I am SOOOOO glad we didn’t!)

This is a “picture” I took of a “picture” several years ago. Yikes! It’s painful for me to look at. Sorry the picture quality is so poor.

Can you see why I just wanted to cover the whole thing up? So dull and bland.

Finally, this fall, we decided to do something to change it. It was a very SIMPLE and CHEAP re-do.

We started by painting the mantle white and adding some molding details on the top and bottom.

Then we took out the old gold-tone fireplace cover, cleaned up the inside and painted it black, and bought a black fireplace screen from Target to place in front.

My husband also installed can lights in the ceiling to spotlight the mantel.

That’s it! And the difference was amazing!

I added this Christmas picture to compare to the old Christmas picture. And it seems I only take pictures of my fireplace around Christmas time anyway.

The picture below shows the molding he added to the top and bottom of the wood mantel.

We were very pleased with the results.

Blessings!