How to Paint a Brick Fireplace

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How to transform your fireplace with paint in a weekend!

Updated 4/27/20

This was one of the first posts I ever wrote when I started this blog almost two year ago and YIKES. I did not know what I was doing! But it’s fun to look back and see how far our house has come!

Our painted fireplace has held up beautifully and you can continue reading for how to paint a brick fireplace!

I’ve wanted a painted white brick fireplace for YEARS. In our last house the brick was dark and dingy and I kept planning on painting it, but just never got around to it, so after moving into our new house in May, we decided to make it a priority on the to-do list.

The new house had a fireplace similar to our old one, dark and dingy. But it had great potential with the wood mantle and pretty built-ins. We finally got started on it last weekend.

Let. Me. Tell. You. WOW! What a HUGE transformation!

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How to Paint a Brick Fireplace

What you’ll need for this project:

Primer
Masonry Paint (we didn’t know this existed at the time and just used regular latex, which has held up fine!)
High-density roller cover
Paint brush
Painter’s tape

Here’s what the fireplace looked like before:

We started by removing the corbels. They just looked weird to me. They were almost too much for the mantle. But I kept them and plan on repurposing them as bookends or décor when I decorate the built-ins.

UPDATE: See the refinished corbels here!

After removing the corbels, we cleaned the brick with soap and water to remove the dust and soot. Next, we taped off around the area using blue painter’s tape.

Then we primed it so that it wouldn’t soak up the paint. Here’s the top of the fireplace with a coat of primer:

After the primer dried, which didn’t take long, we rolled on the first coat of paint.

We used Ultra Pure White by Behr but we love Glidden’s Premium Paint + Primer so we had them look up the color in their database at Home Depot and mix it with the Glidden brand.

We chose an eggshell finish.

Having never done this before, we just purchased a regular roller cover. But the surface of the fireplace is obviously rough, so the rolling got a little tedious. Be sure to purchase a high-density roller cover. They are thicker and made for rough surfaces like brick.

The bricks came out close to a 1/2 inch from the grout in some places. We had to go back in with a brush to get the grout. A thicker roller cover probably would’ve helped with this, as well!

It took one more coat for a total of three (primer + two coats of paint) to completely cover the brick.

Here’s how the fireplace looked after the final coat of paint:

So much better! This was an easy, although sometimes tedious, and inexpensive transformation in just one weekend! I wish I’d gotten a better picture at this stage but we still had the built-ins and a few other things we wanted to do.

You can read about how we refinished our mantle in this post. And check out this post to see the whole space after we got the builtins painted!

For a video on how to paint your fireplace, check out this tutorial.

Thanks so much for stopping by today! I hope this post was helpful! As always, please feel free to leave a comment or question or shoot me an email! Have a great day!

How to transform your fireplace with paint in a weekend!

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