New fireplace

I have disliked our fireplace/mantel since we moved in.  The mantle is just a plain piece of dark rough wood – you can’t even dust it because little pieces of cloth or paper towel just get snagged up in the rough service.  The brick color is just ugly and has too much variation.  We’ve been discussing what to do for a long time and came up with several options. 
Then, thanks to wonderful Pinterest, I came along this tutorial and knew we just had to do this to our fireplace!

Source: askannamoseley.com via Marissa on Pinterest

So, after being gone a week, Jeremy surprised me yesterday at Lowes, we were there doing the fire truck workshop you just read about, and said, do you want to stain the fireplace today?  Um…yeah!  So, we headed to Home Depot to get the concrete stain they used in the tutorial made by Behr.  Side note – we love Behr everything and only use their paint.  So after purchasing the concrete stain and an extra brush we headed home to get to work.

Jeremy cleaned up the fireplace really well!  And of course Tyler helped with the vacuum.  Here is the before – UGLY! Notice the wide variations in color and boring grey mortar?

After!  Beautiful dark brown and updated!  And all it took was one coat of Behr concrete stain in the Loden color.  So if you hate your fireplace – get some concrete stain and change it!

Now, just imagine and beautiful white mantel sitting on top.  As soon I can make some space in the garage for Jeremy to work – that is the next project.  That and finding some gas logs to hook up to the already existing gas line.