Painting a Fireplace

Fall is coming, fall is coming! Pumpkins! Apple picking! Colorful leaves! And when I think of fall, I also think of fireplaces. We’ve done a tutorial on our painted brick fireplace before. Today, we’re talking about painting a fireplace…specifically how to update the trim of the wood stove or glass doors you may have around your firebox. It’s an easy project. Most of the time you’ll spend on it will be doing the prep work.

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Supplies needed for painting a fireplace with high-temperature paint:

• painters tape
• painters plastic
• high temperature spray paint
• comfort spray grip for paint (nice to have, but not necessary)

The shot above is how our fireplace looked when we moved into our home. It looks GREAT in this shot, actually. In real life, it was super banged up, dingy, and REALLY 1990’s brassy. And if you’ve been here before, you may know I have some choice words about brass.

We finished our painted brick fireplace a while back. And while we were tackling that project, we also tackled updating the actual firebox…in our case, the outside of our wood burning stove. Specifically, we wanted to update all that brass trim that you may be able to see in the shot below.

It was a SUPER easy DIY project. Nothing about it is difficult. The only thing that is remotely time-consuming is prepping for the paint. Let’s get into the details!

How to Paint a fireplace with high-temperature paint:

1. Prep your wood stove/firebox

Use Painter’s tape off ALL exposed areas around firebox that you do NOT want to paint. Cover surrounding area with painters plastic.

TAKE YOUR TIME on this step. The better your tape job, the better your results will be on this project. You have to make sure you tape off every little area that you don’t want that paint to hit. And use your painters plastic to cover a WIDE area of the room surrounding the fireplace.

We are using high-temperature spray paint for this project, and like all spray paint, it can get EVERYWHERE if you are not careful. Better to be safe than sorry. You can see how much real estate I covered with the painter’s plastic above.

2.) spray, Spray, SPRAY!!

You’re off to the races! Now, if you have a LOT of area to cover, I highly recommend using an inexpensive comfort grip for your spray paint can. It just fastens on top, and it alleviates 1) getting paint on your hands and 2) the pain and numbness and tingling that can happen if you’ve been hitting that spray paint trigger too long!

Stay about 6″ or so from the painting surface, and it’s better to do several light coats than one gloppy, sloppy heavy coat.

We used two coats for ours. Make sure you wait until the paint is thoroughly dried before removing your tape and painters plastic.

This inexpensive painting project has made a big difference in the look and feel of our family room.

That and adding the faux beams. YES…FAUX beams. The cost a fraction of what the real ones do! And it’s another fairly easy DIY project.

Since we’re talking about fall and all, I’ll leave you with a picture of our “fall mantle” last year. Look, I know, it’s not much. In fact, it’s hardly anything. But you can only pick so many battles, right? And last year, sanity won out (kinda) over uber-beautifully decorated mantle-scaping. We’ll try again this year (maybe…probably not).