The whole room started out with four walls of paneling. And faux wood ceiling beams. I figured I would just paint everything to brighten it up. But, of course, that would be too easy. The family room opened up to the sun room add-on. Which is great. The old exterior sliding glass door between them - not so great. Since we knew we had to remove the door, we would expose a section of drywall where the jam used to be. And that was just the start. We realized, after living in the home for a while, that the ceiling beams made the room feel too short. I mean, this is a house from the 60's - before vaulted ceilings were the norm. We knew we wanted to tear the beams down - further exposing holes in the paneling. We discussed the problems for a while, and finally decided that we needed to do it right - lose the paneling. Craig and I pulled the beams and paneling out and had the drywall patched. And we decided to take out the built in book cases out also. Here's the only shot I have of the before of the fireplace wall when we moved in:
I know the picture has some sort of funky thing at the bottom - sorry, I have no idea what that is. :-) But you can see what we started with. Not so pretty. So the bookcases, beams, paneling, mantle, and hearth came out. We painted the drywall, added a black granite hearth, and had a custom made mantle installed. Here's the fireplace almost complete:
Huge improvement already! I had two things left to do - paint the brick. And paint the brass metal doors. This is the scene as I was preparing to paint the brick. Do you see that cat litter bucket? That's where I swept the old ashes - I figured since the metal doors were off, I might as well give it a good cleaning. After that, I primed the brick with oil based primer, then two coats of paint (Glidden Onyx Black in satin). This is what it looks like now:
Notice that I didn't paint the inside of the firebox - we actually use the fireplace and I didn't use high heat paint on the brick (I will on the metal doors). Now all that's left is to spray the metal doors. And this fireplace will be gorgeous!
